Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded Facebook profile pictures.

This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.

The profile ID dump was downloadable through a BitTorrent named fbdata.torrent of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:This dump widely reported e.g. on Hacker News at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558.

At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture mentions:This is also mentioned e.g. at: stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.

Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314#37501314

He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to YouTube. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.

Companies like YouTube blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like security through obscurity. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.

But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.

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

A person who gives financial advice, notably personal finance advice. Some of them are questinable guru-like beings, and many are on YouTube.

Google has put considerable effort into custom hardware to greatly optimize its stack, in a way that is quite notable compared to other tech companies.

I can't believe there isn't a YouTube video comparing various substances for each flammability and instability ratings, this would be a huge hit.

Examples:

An ion selective electrode is tool used in analytical chemistry used to determine the concentration of a given ion in a solution.

The method can determine the concentration of one ion even if there are multiple different types of ion in the solution, although in some cases this can alter the results. This is done with the help of a selective membrane that only allows certain ions through.

One cool example application mentioned on LibreTexts^[ref] is the measurement of fluorine concentration in water. They explain that fluorine is added to the drinking water supply in some countries to help protect people's teeth, and so you want to be able to measure as part of quality control to make sure it is being added in correct the quantities.

The method requires calibrating with calibrating solutions which takes one hour, but once you are calibrated you just stick the sensor into the analyte and get readings in a minute without any expendables. The membrane seems to be a bit fragile which requires care, but overall it looks like a convenient method.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli enjoyed watching the temple flashback moments on YouTube.

Combat in the USA is of course terribly ridiculous due to guns Are Worthless.

Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the reserved list in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake legally! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. Penny Dreadful puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.

A cool thing is when they printed Garth One-Eye, which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that Ciro Santilli admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.

This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in Brazil yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young Timmys got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive black lotuses?

Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:

There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on YouTube.

And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.

This incredibly foul mouthed band was incredibly funny.

Ciro Santilli was a bit young to understand the songs at the time, but the older boys were singing them, and he sang along. So maybe there is a nostalgia factor in play.

But it can't be just that. They are just too funny and brutal, even when Ciro re-listens to it as of 2020.

Many Brazilian religious cranks in were really happy when their plane crashed and killed all of them in 1996.

Official YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCPmfP5LNbxYwlN0k6C3F_6w

Best songs:

Marc Verdiell is a French electrical engineer born in 1963 or 1964^[ref] and best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel where he does mind blowing repairs and reverse engineering of vintage computers and other electronic equipment.

Marc sold his company LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in April 2001. This was just after the dot-com crash, but Intel apparently still correctly believed that the networking and the Internet would continue to grow and was investing in the area. His associate Frank Shum sued claiming he should be credited for some of the inventions sold but lost and Marc got it all.^{[ref][ref][ref]}. Marc was then almost immediately appointed an Intel fellow at the extremelly early age of 37, and then stayed for a few years at Intel until 2006 according to his LinkedIn.^[ref][ref]

Marc's LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/marc-verdiell-9742795/

Marc's full name is actualy Jean-Marc Verdiell, but Ciro Santilli remembers there was one YouTube video where he mentions he gave up on "Jean" partly because anglophones would murder its pronounciation all the time.

Marc's PhD thesis is listed at: theses.fr/1990PA112048 and it is entitled:which is translated into English as:but the full text is not available online.

YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@maxplanckquantum

Since images are large, they bring the following challenges:

To solve those problems, the following alternatives appear to be stable enough and should be used decreasing preference:

The following alternatives seem impossible because Ciro could not find if they expose direct links to the images:

The following do have direct links:

For videos, YouTube does not allow download, even of Creative Commons videos so uploading only there is not acceptable as it prevents reuse:

This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.

So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.

Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?

The console has only 4 MB of RAM memory. It is quite incredible what can be done with 8 MB, from the point of view of a 2020 worls where 16 GB laptops are the norm.

Don't like this very much, but if it's the only way...

Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.

Then:

Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:

Existing lecture notes by students:

Lecture note upload website:

Exams uploads:

This is a porn style defined by Ciro Santilli as:Ciro believes that this is an interesting type of pornography, as it feels more natural and humane than all the horrible trash that comes out of horrendous professional mainstream porn industry.

Yes, it could go down the YouTube/Instagram alley, and lead the vloggers to do things they wouldn't normally do because of the audience. But who is to say that Ciro Santilli doesn't do the same on Stack Overflow to some extent?

That type of porn requires some big courage to make. Or balls if you will. Kudos to those creators, as it is so taboo it could greatly impact their future job prospects.

The travel sex vlog appears to be the most popular way to do it. Presuamably the reason being that you would not be able to interact with people in a normal job, so to keep things interesting you need to go to some random places.

Examples:

Quora is crap in many, many senses, but in part due to some bad Stack Overflow policies, it is the best crap we've got for certain (mostly useless) subjects. Until OurBigBook.com dominates the world.

The worst thing about quora is that you cannot subscribe only to certain subjects on your feed. Quora just keeps pumping shit you never subscribed to, no matter what. Ciro, for sport, unfollowed every single idiotic subject it was proposing, but it didn't work, sooner or later Quora just keeps pumping more shit back. Mind you, some of that shit is fun. But it's still shit. Though on second thought, YouTube also randomly decides to reset Ciro's humongous "don't recomend this shitty channel" choices from time to time, which is not much different...

Other terrible things, they just seem to have an incredible ability of making the website worse and more annoying over time! Truly amazing:

Quora is getting so bad that it is basically being killed by Reddit, especially after they lifted the 6-month hard thread lock...

See also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/quora for a coverage of the intense pro-CCP astroturfing present on the website.

John Thompson's Guqin website.

Holy crap amazing list of Guqin pieces by the guy for MP3 download! www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm And the explanations are insane. What a dude. Ciro Santilli's hero.

Download all MP3:

Ciro Santilli Contacted John by email in 2019 telling him to put his stuff on YouTube and offering help, and he replied, but nothing came of it unfortunately. Edit: he uploaded a bunch of videos of him playing live in 2020! www.youtube.com/user/silkqin/videos

John focuses on playing the tunes in a "historically informed performance", in particular using silk strings rather than metal ones which are used by most modern artists: www.silkqin.com/08anal/hip.htm