MongoDB è un database NoSQL open source, facilmente scalabile e ad alte prestazioni. Mantiene alcune similitudini coi database relazionali il che, a mio avviso, lo rende un’ottima scelta per chi si sta avvicinando al mondo NoSQL. Il Piccolo Libro è stato scritto proprio per questo tipo di lettore, ma soddisferà senz’altro anche l’esperto che vuole saperne di più su Mongo. Non lasciatevi ingannare da facilità d’uso e giovane età: MongoDB è in grado di soddisfare anche i palati più esigenti.

Note sulla traduzione

Per garantire la coerenza del testo rispetto al tutorial interattivo online sviluppato dall’autore del libro, i nomi di database, collezioni, documenti e campi degli esempi sono stati mantenuti in lingua originale. Vi invito a segnalarmi qualunque errore di traduzione, battitura o impaginazione (ce ne sono di sicuro). Poiché il sorgente è su GitHub potete apportare e proporre voi stessi le correzioni, via pull-request. Ci terrei a migliorare la qualità del prodotto, anche e soprattutto grazie alla vostra collaborazione.

Seconda edizione

La traduzione Italiana è ora allineata alla seconda edizione inglese ed a MongoDB 2.6. Questa edizione include una introduzione al Aggregation Framework e, tra le altre cose, l’aggiornamento di tutti i link di approfondimento.

Download

Il Piccolo Libro di MongoDB è più disponibile per il download, ma potete recuperarne il testo qui.

Il Piccolo Libro su Goodreads

Il libro è su Goodreads. Se volete aggiungete commenti e/o valutazioni contribuendo così alla sua diffusione – Grazie.

MongoDB in Italia

Fino ad oggi MongoDB non si è diffuso granché nel nostro paese e credo che una delle cause sia  proprio la mancanza di risorse in lingua italiana. Purtroppo in Italia la barriera linguistica è ancora un grande ostacolo alla diffusione di quella conoscenza condivisa che, grazie alla rete, è sempre più diffusa a livello globale. Mi auguro davvero che Il Piccolo Libro di MongoDB contribuisca alla diffusione di Mongo anche dalle nostre parti.

C’è voluto un bel po’ di lavoro, ma sono contento di averlo portato a termine.

2026

• Portnoy’s complaint, Philip Roth ★★★★★
• Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio, Dino Buzzati ★★★★★
• Lettere luterane, Pier Paolo Pasolini ★☆☆☆☆
• The hunting gun, Inoue Yasushi ★★★☆☆
• Una ballata del mare salato, Hugo Pratt ★★☆☆☆
• Varie cose sulle sequoie e sul tempo, Jón Kalman Stefánsson ★★★☆☆
• La giusta distanza dal male, Giorgia Protti ★★★★★
• Lone Wolf, Adam Weymouth ★★★★☆
• Jens Munk, Thorkild Hansen ★★★★☆
• Il caso Bramard, Davide Longo ★★★☆☆

2025

• Il mangiatore di pietre, Davide Longo ★★★☆☆
• Across arctic America, Knud Rasmussen ★★★☆☆
• Orbit Orbit, Caparezza ★★★★☆
• Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe ★★★★☆
• A Nord di Thule, Knud Rasmussen ★★★★☆
• Pornorama, Claudia Grande ★★★☆☆
• The Day of Judgment, Salvatore Satta ★★★★★
• Stasiland, Anna Funder ★★★★★
• The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ★★★★☆
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes ★★★★☆
• Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry ★★★★☆
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir ★★★☆☆
• Assalto alle Alpi, Marco A. Ferrari ★★★★☆
• Lost in Translation, Ottavio Fatica ★★☆☆☆
• The Mental Load, A Feminist Comic, by Emma ★★★★☆
• Ragazzo, Zuzu ★★★☆☆
• La Storia, Elsa Morante ★★★★☆
• Le voci della sera, Natalia Ginzburg ★★★☆☆
• S., Gipi ★★★☆☆
• Le valli della memoria, Pietro Scarnera ★★☆☆☆
• La mia vita disegnata male, Gipi ★★★★☆
• La grande rimozione, Roberto Grossi ★★★★☆
• A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, David Foster Wallace ★★★☆☆
• The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales, Oliver Sacks ★★★☆☆
• Source code, Bill Gates ★★★★☆
• Papyrus, Irene Vallejo ★★★★☆
• Libera Università, Tomaso Montanari ★★★★☆
• Cambiare la storia, Adriano Prosperi ★★★★☆
• Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, Ben Montgomery ★★★☆☆
• The death of Ivan Ilych, Lev Tolstoj ★★★★☆
• La scomparsa di Majorana, Leonardo Sascia ★★★☆☆
• The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese ★★★★☆
• Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa ★★★☆☆
• The heartbeat of the wild, David Quammen ★★★☆☆

2024

• All your children, scattered, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse ★★★★☆
• Altri libertini, Pier Vittorio Tondelli ★★★★☆
• New York Trilogy, Paul Auster ★★★★☆
• Class trip, Emmanuel Carrère ★★★☆☆
• White noise, Don DeLillo ★★★★☆
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Damien Lewis ★★★☆☆
• The tree-body problem, Cixin Liu ★★★★☆
• Blame! Vol. 2, Tsutomu Nihei ★★★★☆
• Walking, Erling Kagge ★★★☆☆
• Lacci, Domenico Starnone ★★★★☆
• The bastard brigade, Sam Kean ★★★★☆
• Storia di mia vita, Janek Gorczyca ★★☆☆☆
• Pao Pao, Pier Vittorio Tondelli ★★★☆☆
• Slow Horses, Mick Herron ★★★☆☆
• Trappole alimentari, Stefano Vendrame ★★★☆☆
• Taccuino 1870-1884, Giuseppe De Nittis ★★★☆☆
• Blame! Vol. 1, Tsutomu Nihei ★★★★☆
• I love Russia, Elena Kostyuchenko ★★★☆☆
• My Ingeborg, Tore Renberg ★★★★☆
• Kind of Blue: the making of the Miles Davis masterpiece, Ashley Kahn ★★★☆☆
• Sixty Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home, Malachy Tallack ★★★☆☆
• Replay, Jordan Mechner ★★★★☆
• The Horde: how the Mongols changed the world, Marie Favereau ★★★★☆
• La resistenza delle donne, Benedetta Tobagi ★★★☆☆
• Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry ★☆☆☆☆
• Family Lexicon (Lessico Famigliare), Natalia Ginzburg ★★★★☆
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov ★★★★★
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius ★★★★☆
• The garden of the Finzi-Contini, Giorgio Bassani ★★★★☆
• The question of Palestine, Edward W. Said ★★★☆☆

2023

Books I read in 2023: wrap-up and reviews

• The sorrows of young Werther, J.W. von Goethe ★★★☆☆
• Happiness, as such (Caro Michele), Natialia Ginzburg ★★★☆☆
• The ancient hours (L’ultima cosa bella sulla faccia della terra), M. Bible ★★★★☆
• Milano calibro 9, Giorgio Scerbanenco ★★☆☆☆
• Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy ★★★★☆
• Ferrovie del messico, Gian Marco Griffi ★★★★☆
• ADHD workbook for adults (ADHD negli adulti), Tara Wilson ★★☆☆☆
• Codice Jury, Jury Chechi ★★☆☆☆
• High (La vita in alto. Una stagione sul’Himalaya), Erica Fatland ★★★☆☆
• The passenger (Il passeggero), Cormac McCarthy ★★★★☆
• Born to run 2, Chris McDougall and Eric Orton ★★☆☆☆
• Blind’s man bluff (Immersione rapida), Sharry Sontag, Christopher Drew ★★★☆☆
• Wuthering Heights (Cime Tempestose), Emily Bronte ★★★★☆
• L’umanità è un tirocinio, Domenico Starnone ★★☆☆☆
• The overstory (Il sussurro del mondo), Richard Powers ★☆☆☆☆
• La mossa del matto, Alessandro Barbaglia ★★★☆☆
• Disasters (Disastri), Daniil Charms ★★★☆☆
• Land and Sea (Terra e mare), Carl Schmitt ★★☆☆☆
• Medieval callings (Vita nel medioevo), Jacques Le Goff ★★★☆☆
• Being wolf (Essere lupo), Kerstin Ekman ★★★☆☆
• No sleep till Shengal, Zerocalcare ★★☆☆☆
• Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson ★★☆☆☆
• Sanguina ancora, Paolo Nori ★★★☆☆
• Uomini, boschi e api, Mario Rigoni Stern ★★☆☆☆

2022

My favorite books of 2022

• Stoner, John Williams
• Candide, Voltaire
• When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut
• Mašen’ka, Vladimir Nabokov
• The Crow Comes Last, Italo Calvino
• Ravenna, Judith Herrin
• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Smiling Bears, Else Poulsen
• A captive West or the tragedy of Central Europe, Milan Kundera
• Just an Ordinary Day, Shirley Jackson
• Italica, Giacomo Papi
• The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
• Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
• Lone Rider, Elspeth Beard
• Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
• Fiabe finlandesi, various authors

2021

Three good books I read in 2021

• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
• A proposito del senso della vita, Vito Mancuso
• Un uomo inutile, Sait Faik Abasiyanik
• Endurance, Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
• La matematica è politica, Chiara Valerio
• King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne, Janet L. Nelson
• Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music, Jan Swafford
• Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
• Proud tobea Flyer, Matteo Sola
• Nomadland, Jessica Bruder
• Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, Volker Ullrich
• Potere alle Parole, Vera Gheno
• Alpi ribelli, Enrico Camanni
• The Voice of the Sirens. The Greeks and the art of persuasion, Laura Pepe
• One Man Caravan, Robert Edison Fulton
• The Silence: A Novel, Don DeLillo
• In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick
• Materada, Fulvio Tomizza
• The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel
• We Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Erebus: The Story of a Ship, Michael Palin

2020

Five good books I read in 2020

• Terra incognita, Sebastiano Barisoni
• Leggende groenlandesi, Knud Rasmussen
• Nero d’inferno, Matteo Cavezzali
• Il tempo della rivolta, Donatella Di Cesare
• L’ordine nascosto: la vita segreta dei funghi, Merlin Sheldrake
• Dante, Alessandro Barbero
• Il ritorno del Re, JRR Tolkien (new translation by O. Fatica)
• Il piccolo libro dell’investimento, John C. Bogle
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
• Sognando Jupiter, Ted Simmons
• HHhH, Laurent Binet
• Il cuore di un’ape, Helen Jukes
• Come le mosche d’autunno, Irène Némirovsky
• Per chi suona la campana, Ernest Hemingway
• Uomini e topi, John Steinbeck
• Il Maestro e Margherita, Michail Bulgakov
• 1984, George Orwell
• Lo Hobbit, un viaggio verso la maturità, William H. Green
• Sentieri nel ghiaccio, Werner Herzog
• Pachidermi e pappagalli, Carlo Cottarelli
• La strada di Swann, Marcel Proust
• La vita felice, Lucio Anneo Seneca
• La brevità della vita, Lucio Anneo Seneca
• Saggio sulla lucidità, José Saramago
• Pietro e Paolo, Marcello Fois
• Possiamo salvare il mondo, prima di cena, Jonathan Safran Foer
• Masters of Doom, David Kushner
• Tyll, Daniel Kehlmann
• Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

2019

• Fiabe norvegesi, AA.VV.
• Genesi, Guido Tonelli
• La lotteria, Shirley Jackson
• Il vichingo nero, Bergsveinn Birgisson
• La compagnia dell’anello, JRR Tolkien (new translation by O. Fatica)
• La nascita della filosofia, Giorgio Colli
• Macchine come me, Ian McEwan
• La guerra segreta, Max Hastings
• Viaggio di una parigina a Lhasa, Alexandra David-Néel
• Il futuro è storia, Masha Gessen
• Guida galattica per gli autostoppisti, Douglas Adams
• Come sfasciare un paese in sette mosse, Ece Temelkuran
• Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente, Francesca Mannocchi
• Nondimanco, Carlo Ginzburg
• Sulla motocicletta, John Berger
• Proletkult, Wu Ming
• Metamorfosi, Ovidio
• Grüne Linie, Giancarlo Barzagli
• Get programming with F#, Isaac Abraham
• Diario di una apprendista astronauta, Samantha Cristoforetti
• Il grande gioco, Peter Hopkirk
• The Passenger: Giappone, AA.VV.
• La vita segreta: tre storie vere dell’era digitale, Andrew O’Hagan
• Peaks of Europe, Johan Lolos
• Marco Polo: Viaggio ai confini del Medioevo, Giulio Busy

2018

• Fiabe faroesi, AA.VV.
• Lezioni di letteratura, Vladimir Nabokov
• La caduta di Gongolin, JRR Tolkien
• Paranoia, Shirley Jackson
• The Passenger: Olanda, AA.VV.
• Fuga in Europa, Stephen Smith
• Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, Krista Halverson
• Memorie di un cacciatore, Ivan Turgenev
• Atlantico, Simon Winchester
• Amore e ginnastica, Edmondo De Amicis
• Il campo di nessuno, Daniel Picouly
• Il professore e il pazzo, Simon Winchester
• The Passenger: Islanda, AA.VV.
• Brutti incontri al chiaro di luna, W. Stanley Moss
• Aua, Knud Rasmussen
• Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
• Isola, Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
• Una vita da libraio, Shaun Bythell
• Il più grande uomo scimmia del Pleistocene, Roy Lewis
• Autunno tedesco, Stig Dagerman
• Cos’è la scienza. La rivoluzione di Anassimandro, Carlo Rovelli
• La danzatrice di Izu, Yasunari Kawabata
• Tutto quello che è un uomo, David Szalay
• Parla, ricordo, Vladimir Nabokov
• Musicofilia, Oliver Sacks
• Pensieri spettinati, Stanisław Jerzy Lec
• How we’ll live on Mars, Stephen L. Petranek
• Sinfonia Leningrado, Sarah Quigley
• Il silenzio, Erling Kagge

2017

• Arboreto salvatico, Mario Rigoni Stern
• Il soccombente, Thomas Bernhard
• L’invenzione della solitudine, Paul Auster
• Sapiens. Da animali a Dei, Yuval Noah Harari
• Vita di un uomo: Francesco d’Assisi, Chiara Frugoni
• L’Arminuta, Donatella di Pietrantonio
• Bull Mountain, Brian Panowich
• Cosmo, Witold Gombrowicz
• Controvento, Federico Pace
• La via dello zen, Alan W. Watts
• Le otto montagne. Paolo Cognetti
• Eredità, Corrado Stajano
• Una cosa divertente che non farò mai più, David Foster Wallace
• L’ultimo arrivato, Marco Balzano
• L’arte della fuga, Fredrik Sjöberg
• Norvegian wood, Lars Mytting
• L’ordine del tempo, Carlo Rovelli
• Il fondamentalista riluttante, Moshin Hamid
• Il giro del miele, Sandro Campani
• Le nostre anime di notte, Kent Haruf
• Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
• Follia, Patrick McGrath
• La ricetta del dottor Wasser, Lars Gustafsson
• La conquista del Paradiso, Paul M. Cobb
• Il pastore d’Islanda, Gunnar Gunnarsson
• La casa dei Krull, Georges Simenon
• La vita segreta degli alberi, Peter Wohlleben
• L’arte di essere fragili, Alessandro D’Avenia
• Sei pezzi facili, Richard Faynman
• Scherzetto, Domenico Starnone
• Born to run, Bruce Springsteen
• Fiabe lapponi, Bruno Berni

2016

• I viaggi di Jupiter, Ted Simon
• Zero K, Don DeLillo
• Il sentiero degli eroi, Marco Albino Ferrari
• La vegetariana, Han Kang
• L’incanto del lotto 49, Thomas Pynchon
• La settimana bianca, Emmanuel Carrère
• L’ultimo serpente, A.B. Guthrie
• Mea culpa, Francesco Fuschini
• Il vecchio e il mare, Ernest Hemingway
• Capitani coraggiosi, Rudyard Kipling
• Regni dimenticati, Gerard Russell
• Il processo, Franz Kafka
• Canone inverso, Paolo Maurensig
• Un anno sull’altipiano, Emilio Lussu
• Gente indipendente, Halldór Laxness
• Diario di un parroco di campagna, Georges Bernanos
• Le mele di Kafka, Andrea Vitali
• Purity, Jonathan Franzen
• Sette Maghi, Halldór Laxness
• La guardia, il poeta e l’investigatore, Jung-myung Lee
• La vita e il tempo di Michael K., J.M. Coetzee
• Io e Mabel ovvero l’arte della falconeria, Helen Macdonald
• Una parete sottile, Enrico Regazzoni
• Furore, John Steinbeck
• La Metamorfosi, Franz Kafka
• Lo zen e l’arte della manutenzione della motocicletta, Robert M. Pirsing
• La notte di Gerusalemme, Sven Delblanc
• Saga di Ragnarr, Anonimo
• Limonov, Emmanuel Carrère
• E l’uomo inventò il cane, Konrad Lorenz
• Abolire il carcere, Luigi Manconi et alii
• Il ritorno del guerriero: lettura dell’Odissea, G. Aurelio Privitera
• L’invenzione della madre, Marco Peano
• Un infinito numero, Sebastiano Vassalli

2015

• Fiabe Danesi, Bruno Berni
• Mattatoio n°5, Kurt Vonnegut
• Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges
• Monte Athos, Robert Byron
• Solo bagaglio a mano, Gabriele Romagnoli
• Un angelo migliore, Chris Adrian
• Il caso Meursault, Kamel Daoud
• Il caso, Joseph Conrad
• La strada interrotta, Patrick Leigh Fermor
• La biblioteca: una storia mondiale, James W.P. Campbell
• Land grabbing, Stefano Liberti
• La tregua, Primo Levi
• Tra i boschi e l’acqua, Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Dedalus, James Joyce
• I frutti della terra, Knut Hamsun
• Laxdæla Saga, Anonimo
• Misteri, Knut Hamsun
• Epepe, Ferenc Karinthy
• Operazione Fritham, Monica Kristensen
• Se questo è un’uomo, Primo Levi
• La congiura, Jaan Kross
• L’arte di collezionare mosche, Fredrik Sjöberg
• Il paese dei coppoloni, Vinicio Capossela
• Storie di Amsterdam, Nescio
• Il Regno, Emmanuel Carrère
• La ballata di Adam Henry, Ian McEwan
• Sette brevi lezioni di fisica, Carlo Rovelli
• Viaggio nelle regioni equatoriali del nuovo continente, A. von Humboldt
• The Little Go Book, Karl Seguin
• The Little Redis Book, Karl Seguin
• Preparare un fuoco, Jack London
• Diario di Oaxaca, Oliver Sacks
• Giuda, Amos Oz
• I colori del ghiaccio, Robert Peroni
• The First 20 Minutes, Gretchen Reynolds
• La leggenda della Rosa di Natale, Selma Lagerlöf

2014

• Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
• Il costo di una vita, Angelo Ferracuti
• Un altro giro di giostra, Tiziano Terzani
• L’assassinio di Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
• Molto forte incredibilmente vicino, Jonathan Safran Foer
• Leonardo da Vinci, Serge Bramly
• L’armata dei sonnambuli, Wu Ming
• Cristoforo Colombo uomo di mare, Samuel Eliot Morison
• Lorenzo il Magnifico, Ivan Cloulas
• Il cardellino, Donna Tartt
• Frugalità, Paolo Legrenzi
• Le vie dei canti, Bruce Chatwin
• La paura e altri racconti della grande guerra, Federico De Roberto
• Indagine sull’Orco, Tommaso Braccini
• Il sentiero degli Dei, Wu Ming 2
• Dove il vento grida più forte, Robert Peroni
• In senso inverso, Philip K. Dick
• Invecchiando gli uomini piangono, Jean-Luc Seigle
• Il fiordo dell’eternità, Kim Leine

In no particular order

• Blackout, Marc Elsberg
• Open, Andre Agassi
• Jack London vita opere e avventura, Daniel Dyer
• Capire il potere, Noam Chomsky
• La stella di Ratner, Don DeLillo
• The Art of Slowing Down, Edward Yu
• I giocatori di Titano, Philip K. Dick
• Nel cuore della foresta, Roger Deakin
• La via del lupo, Marco Albino Ferrari
• Io e te, Niccolò Ammaniti
• Canale Mussolini, Antonio Pennacchi
• Ma gli androidi sognano pecore elettriche?, Philip K. Dick
• Andiamo a correre, Fulvio Massini
• La leggenda dei monti naviganti, Paolo Rumiz
• Neuromante, William Gibson
• Il giorno della civetta, Leonardo Sascia
• Vita nel Medioevo, Eileen Power
• Il tallone di ferro, Jack London
• Ragazzi di vita, Pier Paolo Pasolini
• La promessa, Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• Il vagabondo delle stelle, Jack London
• Finzioni, Jorge Luis Borges
• Oscar e la dama in rosa, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
• La difesa di Luzin, Vladimir Nabokov
• Il formaggio e i vermi, Carlo Ginzburg
• La scopa del sistema, David Foster Wallace
• I Nibelunghi, Anonimo
• Il cerchio celtico, Björn Larsson
• Il giardino di cemento, Ian McEwan
• Edda, Snorri Sturluson
• Brevi interviste con uomini schifosi, David Foster Wallace
• Fuoco Pallido, Vladimir Nabokov
• Il deserto dei Tartari, Dino Buzzati
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi, Umberto Eco
• L’anno della lepre, Arto Paasilina
• I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga
• Non ci sono solo le arance, Jeanette Winterson
• Pastorale americana, Philip Roth
• La famiglia Winshaw, Jonathan Coe
• In viaggio con Erodoto, Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Lo Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
• La via per la Terra di Mezzo, Tom Shippey
• Martin Eden, Jack London
• Camminare, Henry David Thoreau
• Una barca nel bosco, Paola Mastracola
• La sovrana lettrice, Alan Bennett
• JRR Tolkien la biografia, Humphrey Carpenter
• La variante di Lüneburg, Paolo Maurensig
• Ti prendo e ti porto via, Niccolò Ammaniti
• Capo Horn, Bernard Moitessier
• Auto da fé, Canetti Elias
• In fuga, Alice Munro
• Armi acciaio e malattie, Jared Diamond
• La vera storia del pirata Long John Silver, Larsson Björn
• Nuova storia del Jazz, Alyn Shipton
• Il vangelo secondo Gesù Cristo, José Saramago
• Walden, Henry David Throeau
• Tifone, Joseph Conrad
• Il banchiere anarchico, Fernando Pessoa
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
• La peste scarlatta, Jack London
• Il guardiano del frutteto, Cormac McCarthy
• Cuore di tenebra, Joseph Conrad
• Le ceneri di Angela, Frank McCourt
• Le lettere di Berlicche, C.S. Lewis
• Cristo col fucile in spalla, Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
• Racconti incompiuti, JRR Tolkien
• La realtà in trasparenza, JRR Tolkien
• Underworld, Don DeLillo
• Non è un paese per vecchi, Cormac McCarthy
• V, Thomas Pynchon
• JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford
• Il paradiso degli orchi, Daniel Pennac
• Il giovane Holden, JD Salinger
• Dieci piccoli indiani, Agatha Christie
• Jazz, Arrigo Polillo
• La mia prima estate sulla Sierra, John Muir
• Fame, Knut Hamsun
• Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot
• Nelle terre estreme, Jon Krakauer
• Delitto e castigo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Il volo della martora, Mauro Corona
• L’epopea di Gilgameš, Anonimo
• Tre mani nel buio, Eraldo Baldini
• 54, Wu Ming
• I fantasmi delle biblioteche, Jacques Bonnet
• Faccia di sale, Eraldo Baldini
• Gotico rurale, Eraldo Baldini
• Bàrnabo delle montagne, Dino Buzzati
• Il compagno segreto, Joseph Conrad
• La biblioteca dei morti, Glenn Cooper
• Il libro dei libri perduti, Stuart Kelly
• Vertigine della lista, Umberto Eco
• Stella del mattino, Wu Ming 4
• Stagioni, Mario Rigoni Stern
• Inchiesta su Gesù, Corrado Augias
• Il peso della farfalla, Erri De Luca
• RESTful Web Services Cookbok, Subbu Allamaraju
• Il giro del mondo in barcastop, Alberto Di Stefano
• La finestra dei Ruoet, Georges Simenon
• La versione di Barney, Mordecai Richler
• Per questo mi chiamo Giovanni, Luigi Garlando
• Il cimitero di Praga, Umberto Eco
• Nel legno e nella pietra, Mauro Corona
• Diario di un dolore, C.S. Lewis
• Scipione e Annibale, Giovanni Brizzi
• Beowulf, Anonimo
• Dolomiti nella leggenda, Ulrike Kindl
• Leggende delle Dolomiti, Giovanna Zangrandi
• Collezionare libri antichi rari e di pregio, Hanz Tuzzi
• I popoli di Tolkien, Gianfranco de Turris
• Resisto dunque sono, Pietro Trabucchi
• Come il lupo, Eraldo Baldini
• Storia medievale, Massimo Montanari
• De rerum natura, Lucrezio
• I miti nordici, Gianna Chiesa Isnardi
• Perché corriamo, Roberto Weber
• Quell’estate di sangue e di luna, Eraldo Baldini
• 11/22/63, Stephen King
• Bambine, Eraldo Baldini
• Il visconte dimezzato, Italo Calvino
• Il cavaliere inesistente, Italo Calvino
• La collezione, Giampiero Mughini
• Running fast and injury free, Gordon Pirie
• L’uomo che guardava passare i treni, Georges Simenon
• Il brigantaggio meridionale, Aldo De Jaco
• Paesaggi della Terra di Mezzo, Roberto Arduini
• Pan, Knut Hamsun
• Lo zen e il tiro con l’arco, Eugen Herrigel
• La linea d’ombra, Joseph Conrad
• No easy day, Mark Owen
• Eredità, Lilli Gruber
• Immagina i corvi, Luigi Sorrenti
• Point Lenana, Wu Ming 1
• La coscienza di Zeno, Italo Svevo
• Il lupo della steppa, Hermann Hesse
• Trilogia della Fondazione, Isaac Asimov
• Il mondo classico, Robin Lane Fox
• JRR Tokien: A Descriptive Bibliography, Wayne G. Hammond
• Tolkien and Modernity 1, Thomas Honegger
• Tolkien and Modernity 2, Thomas Honegger
• Gente di Dublino, James Joyce
• Ricordi dal sottosuolo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Schegge di luce, Verlyn Flieger
• Tolkien e la Grande Guerra, John Garth
• Ebano, Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Q, Wu Ming
• Storie, Erodoto
• Tempo di regali, Patrick Leigh Fermor
• …and more.

Want me to talk at your event? Get in touch!

2026

• .NET Saturday 2026, Pordenone: Feature Flags e configurazioni dinamiche in C# e .NET curl -u “ik_live_33OYhTW8MdnEpM62HIA8w4OGrsiMKKFK:”
  -X POST https://api.invoicetronic.com/v1/company
  -H “Content-Type: application/json”
  -H “Accept: application/json”
  -d ‘{ “vat”: “IT12345”, “fiscal_code”: “12345”, “name”: “ciao” }’

2025

• WPC 2025, Milan: Feature Flags e configurazioni dinamiche in C# e .NET
• .NET Conference 2025, Milan: Integrare LLM alle nostre applicazioni in .NET con MCP
• DevMarche Summer AI Afternoon: MCP or how to connect our apps to LLMs
• DevRomagna Meetup: MCP or how to connect our apps to LLMs
• .NET Conf 2025, Rome: C# 13 What’s new and interesting

2024

• .NET Conference Italia 2024, Milan: C# 13 What’s new and interesting
• ABP Dotnet Conference 2024, Turkey: C# 12 What’s new and interesting
• WebDay 2024, Milan: Oauth2 e Open ID Connect con ASP.NET Core 8 (video)
• .NET Rome Conference 2024: Oauth2 e Open ID Connect con ASP.NET Core 8

2023

• .NET Conference Italia 2023, Milan: C# 12 What’s new and interesting (video)
• WebDay 2023, Milan: End-to-end testing with Microsoft Playwright
• DevRomagna Meetup, .NET 7 Spotlight

2022

• WPC 2022, Milan: Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps
• DevRomagna: Modern Web Testing with Microsoft Playwright
• WebDay 2022: Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps

2021

• DotNetPodcast: My Open Source experience (Italian)
• Scottish Summit 2021: Introduction to F# and functional programming
• CodeGen 2021: Python REST APIs for Humans

2020

• Sharif University of Technology, Tehran: Open Source Workshop
• The Python Show #7: My Story with Open Source
• Python Conf++ 2020, Moscow: Cerberus or Data Validation for Humans
• Modena Tech Summit 2020: Introduction to F# and functional programming

2019

• PiterPy 2019, St. Petersburg: Python on Windows, the State of the Art
• XPUG Bologna 2019: Introduction to F# and functional programming
• Agile Venture Firenze 2019: My Story with Open Source
• DevMarche 2019: Introduction to F# and functional programming
• Working Software Conf 2019: My Story with Open Source
• Community Days 2019: Introduction to F# and functional programming
• KLab 2019 #3: Git on the frontline

Past

• WPC 2018, Milan: The Mythical Open Source Contributor
• EuroPython 2018, Edinburgh: My Story with Python and Open Source
• PyConWeb 2018, Munich: My Story with Python and Open Source (keynote)
• PyConWeb 2018, Munich: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• PyCon Italy 2018: My Story with Python and Open Source
• PyCon Belarus 2018: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• WPC 2017: Git on the frontline
• GitHub Constellation: My story with Open Source
• Codemotion Milan 2017: Git on the frontline
• PiterPy 2017: Cerberus, Data Validation for Humans
• DevRomagna: Git on the trenches
• EuroPython 2017: Python on Windows Like a Boss
• This is Python 2017: Python on Windows Like a Boss
• Socrates Italy 2017: Git in the trenches
• Socrates Italy 2017: Bringing an Open Source project to the next level
• DevRomagna: Contributing to Open Source projects
• DevRomagna: Git Branching Models and Semantic Versioning
• PyCon Italy 2017: Python on Windows Like a Boss
• PyCon Italy 2017: Microsoft Azure integration with Open Technologies (Panel)
• Codemotion Rome 2017: Restful Web Services for human beings
• Future Decoded 2016: Python Tools for Visual Studio
• PyConUK 2016: Cerberus, Data Validation for Humans
• PyterPy 2016: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• PyCon Italy 2016: Cerberus, Data Validation for Humans (video, Italian)
• PyCon Italy 2016: Web Framework Royal Rumble
• Western Europe MVP Open Day 2016: Real Life .NET Cross Platform
• OpenDomus.net Communities Meetup: Real Life .NET Cross Platform
• Microsoft TecHeroes: Real Life .NET Cross Platform (Italian)
• Microsoft Best of Build: Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (Italian)
• Microsoft TecHeroes: Vim for Visual Studio (Italian)
• Microsoft TecHeroes: Python Tools for Visual Studio (Italian)
• Microsoft TecHeroes: CoderDoojo Coding Club for Kids (Italian)
• Persona Live 2015: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• EuroPython 2014: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• PyCon Italy 2014: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• PyCon Sweden 2014: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• Python Meetup: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• FOSDEM 2014: Eve, REST APIs for Humans
• RomagnaCamp 2013: We Are All Remote Workers
• NoSQL Day 2013: RESTful Web API and MongoDB go for a picnic
• MongoTorino 2013: RESTful Web API and MongoDB go for a picnic
• A Morning With MongoDB: RESTful Web API and MongoDB go for a picnic
• EuroPython 2012: Developing RESTful Web APIs with Python, Flask and MongoDB
• Agenda Digitale Ravenna 2014: CoderDojo Romagna
• Cultura d’Impresa 2.0: Online / Offline
• Liceo Artistico Severini (Ravenna): Identità Reale, Virtuale e Digitale
• Liceo Artistico Severini (Ravenna): Personal Branding per Studenti e non solo
• KnowCamp 2011: Fuga dalla Comfort Zone
• RomagnaCamp 2011: Quattro passi tra le nuvole

Here is a partial list of open source projects I authored:

C#

• FatturaElettronica.NET. Validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the standard defined by the Italian “Agenzia delle Entrate”.

Python

• Eve. Effortlessly build and deploy highly customizable, fully featured RESTful Web Services. Powered by Flask, MongoDB and good intentions.

• Cerberus. Lightweight and extensible data validation library for Python. It provides type checking and other base functionality out of the box and is designed to be easily extensible, allowing for easy custom validation.

• Events. Bringing the elegance of C# EventHanlder to Python. Here is a handy class that encapsulates the core to event subscription and event firing and feels like a “natural” part of the language.

• Flask-Sentinel. OAuth2 Server bundled as a Flask extension. Add OAuth2 capabilities to an existing or brand new Flask application.

• Eve-Swagger. Swagger extension for Eve powered RESTful APIs.

• Flask-MimeRender. Python module for RESTful resource representation using MIME Media-Types and the Flask Microframework.

Other

• Il Piccolo Libro di MongoDB. Authorized Italian translation of The Little MongoDB Book di Karl Seguin.

I’m a coder at heart author of several open source projects, a Microsoft MVP, conference speaker, teacher and consultant. I live in Ravenna, Italy, where I lead the development of Invoicetronic, and electronic invoicing API, and Amica, a hybrid (cloud and on-premise) accounting app for Italian small businesses. I also the creator and organizer of DevRomagna, the developer community in my area.

I am a former runner, climber and swimmer now keeping myself busy with bodyweight training (I think it’s called calisthenics these days). I love reading good books, hiking in the wilderness and riding my Triumph Bonneville.

My all time favourite quote: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go (T.S. Eliot)”

Stay up to date

Any of these options will allow you to read the site updates:

• Subscribe to my free newsletter, Ramblings of a Software Craftsman.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed.
• Follow me on Mastodon

Elsewhere

Find me on:

• GitHub
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn

Get in touch

Via email.

No guest posts

This is my personal website. I will not accept any “guest posts” here, not for compensation and not for any “good cause”. You can stop asking.

I think the future probably belongs to the small companies // individuals more than sprawling conglomerates. There is a huge opportunity for people who use AI to remove everything that isn’t judgment from their workload, and apply that judgement to good products and good services. My theory is that one person, with an AI-augmented operational layer plus taste is the company of the future - and I’d bet on that again and again.

A bold statement for sure. Like many others, I’ve been experiencing this AI acceleration firsthand — more tasks, faster pace, less time to think. It can feel overwhelming. But Westenberg’s framing resonates with me: the goal isn’t to do everything faster, it’s to consciously offload the repetitive and the mundane, and reclaim that space for the work that actually matters. I run a tiny company myself, so I can only hope Joan is right.

Markdown doesn’t do most of what those formats do. You can’t set margins. You can’t do columns. You can’t embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn’t even have a native way to change the font color.

And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn’t about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format.

Markdown Ate The World is a nice and well-informed article. I appreciated the early brief history of word-processing file formats. I didn’t know, for example, that .docx is just a zipped XML file. Oh, and I vividly remember the old times, when .doc files were as fragile as candles in the wind.

windows-1252 encoding in Italian e-invoices has been a persistent headache — it’s technically outside the FatturaPA spec (which mandates UTF-8), but it crops up often enough in real-world invoices from older or misconfigured billing systems that users kept running into it. The Invoicetronic stack has been updated accordingly.

Senior engineering practitioners from major technology companies gathered for a multi-day retreat to confront the questions that matter most as AI transforms software development. The discussions covered more than twenty topics across breakout sessions, but the most significant insights didn’t emerge from one single session. Instead, they surfaced at various intersections; we found that the same concerns kept appearing in different conversations, framed by different people solving different problems.

This publication synthesizes those cross-cutting themes, organized around the patterns that senior leaders need to understand and act on now. The retreat did not produce a single, unified vision of the future, but instead produced something more useful: a map of the fault lines where current practices are breaking and new ones are forming.

– The Future of Software Engineering

Great read. It also taught me about the Chatham House Rule.

Two things stood out: the PR is in draft, and it includes an AI disclosure:

the fix and the test were created by Claude. I don’t have mongo available or all the necessary python versions for testing, so I’m making this a draft PR so that I can verify all the tests/checks pass before marking it as ready to review.

I’m not at all surprised that Claude was used for the fix (I use it daily myself, to great benefit), but I appreciate the disclosure. A careful review of the code wouldn’t have revealed AI involvement.

The idea of submitting a draft to let the CI run and intervene where needed before marking it as ready for review is also smart — especially since, as the author explains, they can’t run the tests locally.

All in all, an exemplary case of AI use in open source, and welcome news at a time when maintainers are under pressure, often flooded with auto-generated junk PRs (in my own small corner, it has happened to me too). As always, it’s not the tool that’s the problem — it’s who uses it, and how.

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it.

We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

– Nolan Lawson, We mourn our craft

Beautiful resource. Some samples came as a true surprise to me, like the New York City Subway signage, though the Italian connection is a bit weak on that one. (via)

The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian – came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time. Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation.

So:

Is there a time that historians use the term ‘Dark Ages’? Yeah, we do use it to talk about source survival rates. It’s not a term we use as a value judgment, however. We just mean that we don’t have a lot of evidence to go off of.

Holy cow Eleanor, color me indoctrinated (via).

Europe must increasingly prepare for a world in which the protection of America is replaced by protection from America. An essential component of this is moving away from dependence on US goods and services and, perhaps most essential of all, US tech and tech infrastructure.

And then, towards the conclusion:

A potential silver lining of Europe disentangling itself from US tech is the opportunity to embed social values and democratic oversight into the design of these systems. US tech firms are massive, centralised surveillance platforms that routinely abuse their users and reproduce existing social inequalities. We could do better via better regulation of the private sector, and more public sector options.

Let’s do it, Europe.

Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others - in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI - I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me.

– Addy Osmani in 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

The one quoted above is #12, and I’ve been religiously abiding by it for a long time, but all 21 are well worth reading. If you’ve been in software engineering long enough, they’ll resonate with you. Also, most lessons apply to all kinds of career paths, not just software.

I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

– Andrej Karpathy

I bought a first-edition Kindle back in the day, but never got around to using it much. After a few attempts to like it, it ended up in a drawer. Fast forward to 2025, I gave myself a second chance and got a Kobo Clara BW, a device I’m digging a lot. Yes, every time I finish an ebook I liked, I’m sad I cannot shelf it, but the advantages are many that I don’t think I’m going back to paper books anytime soon. There will be exceptions, I’m sure, but the norm will be ebook first.

The usual scoring system applies:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars mean a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars mean a book is good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars mean a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

Il mangiatore di pietre, Davide Longo

★★★☆☆

A good, short noir set in the harsh, rugged, and in some ways repellent mountains of Piedmont, on the border with France. The characters are equally tough, children of their land. The writing adapts; less is more.

Across arctic America, Knud Rasmussen

(Il grande viaggio in slitta, Quodlibet)

★★★☆☆

The exceptional account of the sled journey from Greenland to Alaska and on to Siberia. During the sixth Thule expedition, Knud Rasmussen encountered all the Eskimo tribes, documenting them one by one and collecting a huge number of artifacts. This book is a popularized, highly condensed version of Rasmussen’s most ambitious expedition, which was a great success.

Orbit Orbit, Caparezza

★★★★☆

Orbit Orbit marks Caparezza’s debut in comics. He claims that only later did he feel inspired to add a soundtrack that blossomed to become a new album of the same name. While the two works can be enjoyed independently, they form a unique, multi-dimensional work.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

★★★★☆

Heartbreaking. I have always wanted to learn more about what happened in Ireland during the Troubles. Not being Irish, I often found the subject daunting. The prose here is perfectly charged with meaning, and the reader is sucked into the narrative vortex from the very first page, with the insane scene of Jean McConville being torn from the arms of her large and loving family—never to return—by masked thugs. What is shocking here is that this is not a novel, but a journalistic investigation. A rich apparatus of notes accompanies every event narrated or quoted.

A Nord di Thule, Knud Rasmussen

★★★★☆

It is 1912, Greenland is still largely unexplored by Europeans, and the Thule trading station has just been inaugurated. It is from there that Knud Rasmussen sets off in April, accompanied by a Danish cartographer and two Inuit hunters, aboard dog sleds, to map Peary’s Channel. This volume is the expedition’s travel diary, and it is as fascinating, harsh, and adventurous as you can imagine. It is excellent, not for its literary value, but for its testimony to a heroic era that has now disappeared. I am, however, biased, as I have been collecting all of Knud Rasmussen’s writings for some time.

Pornorama, Claudia Grande

★★★☆☆

with pornorama, claudia grande has written an ambitious novel that combines the atmospheres of thomas pynchon and chuck palahniuk with true crime, the most unsuspected innocence and the most heinous brutality, private neuroses and great repressions, a red-light photograph of our contemporary world, so obsessed with death that it disguises it with sex and so deformed by money that it no longer recognizes its violence.

ambitious and courageous. it took too long for the story to start ticking.

The Day of Judgment, Salvatore Satta

(Il giorno del giudizio, Adelphi)

★★★★★

Salvatore Satta tells the story of a city (Nuoro) and a rural Sardinian society that is slowly transforming into something new and profoundly different. The protagonists, with their rituals and customs, belong to the past without knowing it. There is sadness and disillusionment in these pages. No matter their social class, a ray of light never touches the protagonists’ lives. Their lives inevitably all end in the cemetery, the only proof of their passage through this world. Compelling and convincing despite the nihilism that permeates this novel, Satta delivers a masterpiece.

Stasiland, Anna Funder

(C’era una volta la Ddr, Feltrinelli)

★★★★★

The East German Stasi was the world’s best and most efficient secret police, the textbook definition of the omnipresent Big Brother. The Stasi guarded and secured the rule of East Germany’s Communist Party for four decades, during which it seeped into every tiny crevice of East German society. East Germans could not escape the Stasi - in every six people, one was an informer for it; all spaces where life took place were infiltrated and monitored by the Stasi, which kept meticulous records on its subjects. Anna Funder does an extraordinary job in interviewing and telling the personal stories of people on both sides of the table: those persecuted by the service, and officials at various levels in the organization and around it, who took an active part in the action. Reading this work right after The Communist Manifesto was enlightening.

The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

(Manifesto del partito comunista, Feltrinelli)

★★★★☆

One hundred and seventy years later, the truths contained in the Manifesto remain as relevant as ever. Capital’s ability to control our lives through its untouchable ownership of the means of production remains intact. It is difficult to deny that the struggle for emancipation from precariousness, structural exploitation, and alienation should be led not by those who control work in their own interests, but by those who spend their lives working or trying to do so. I am glad I finally read this document. Each of us should go to back the sources first, then proceed from there.

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

(Il senso di una fine, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

Memory can deceive us, and our actions have consequences that we often cannot predict or fully understand. Barnes brilliantly shows how the protagonist selectively remembers events, usually distorting them in his favor. Self-justification and self-deception characterize Tony’s narrative, as he always tends to present himself in a favorable light, minimizing his flaws and responsibilities. Guilt and responsibility emerge towards the end, when Tony discovers the role he played in his friend’s fate.

History is that version of the past we have chosen to believe.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

★★★★☆

It’s hard to put this book down. It’s full of stereotypes about the epic history of the West, but then again, it’s not. It would be more accurate to say that it contributes to shaping them, and it does so in a peculiar way, enriching and retouching them in a captivating manner.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

★★★☆☆

Science fiction that is both incredible and plausible thanks to the extensive research work done by the author of The Martian. Sometimes perhaps it goes overboard with the details and brilliant hacks of the genius scientist and his pal the engineer, but the story remains gripping until the end. The message is clear: it will be cooperation between peoples and between worlds that saves us, not conflict.

Assalto alle Alpi, Marco A. Ferrari

★★★★☆

To give the Alps a future, a new perspective is necessary—one that is aware and respectful. A threat hangs over the Alps in our near future if we continue to draw upon old idealizing stereotypes that reduce the mountains to a salvific place of pure “beauty,” or to an amusement park for tourists fleeing the cities. How can we imagine their near future? In this small but important book, M.A. Ferrari traces a brief history of the “assault on the Alps”: tourist speculation, the “valorization” of the territory, and everything that has led to the current situation. He then attempts to propose new paths, which are actually already being experimented with in various places.

Lost in Translation, Ottavio Fatica

★★☆☆☆

Started well, got bored relatively soon. The insights are sometimes brilliant.

The Mental Load, A Feminist Comic, by Emma

★★★★☆

A graphic novel that captures the condition of women in Western Europe today in 10 episodes; a read for everyone, a starting point for exploring topics such as women’s mental load and emotional labor. I suspect most readers are women; should be men.

Ragazzo, Zuzu

★★★☆☆

Zuzu recounts youthful angst, the collapse of a family unit, and disorientation through a combination of scenes from everyday life and improbable situations, indulging in explicit yet childlike sexuality, without forgetting to reveal the truth through dreamlike scenes that devour reality to lead to other moments. These are certainly the most powerful moments in the entire work, in terms of intensity and visual anarchy.

History (La Storia), Elsa Morante

★★★★☆

The story of a small, humble, and desperate Roman family forced to face the great historical events of the advent of totalitarianism in Italy and Europe, World War II, and its consequences. One of the best-selling books of all time in Italy, it still sells very well today, and for good reason. It sparked great controversy and envy when it was released, but time has proven it right.

Voices in the Evening (Le voci della sera), Natalia Ginzburg

★★★☆☆

Audiobook. The story of the seemingly dull and claustrophobic life in a small town in the Piedmont province during and after World War II. Charming short work, with some rich and interesting characters.

S., Gipi

★★★☆☆

S. is short for Sergio, the name of the author’s father, who recently passed away. The book is a collection of autobiographical memories and stories set in Tuscany between 1943 and roughly the end of the century. It’s beautiful, but it didn’t engage me as much as I thought it would. I appreciated the fact that it didn’t hide some of the weaknesses of the parental figure.

Le valli della memoria, Pietro Scarnera

★★☆☆☆

A small comic book on the “History of the Liberation of Ravenna,” partly subsidized by the Municipality of Ravenna and published by Coconino (a prominent Italian comic book publisher). The idea of involving the young grandchildren of the protagonists of that era in a dreamlike way is interesting because, in the end, the message is always the same: don’t forget and treasure the lessons of history so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

La mia vita disegnata male, Gipi

★★★★☆

It is a journey back in time to rediscover the author’s own life, but also an evolution in comic book representation, moving towards a more simplified style. The essential, shaky, almost childish lines correspond, from a psychological point of view to the loss of references, the display of the author’s problems and his vision of the world. Gipi has a taste for jokes; he plays down and demystifies humbly and entertainingly. It’s just a life lived (very) badly, like so many others. But the “poorly drawn” cartoons are interspersed with “well-drawn” ones, almost as if the author wanted to show us that, if he wanted to, he is an artist with excellent technical skill. All in all, between dreams, nightmares, irony, melancholy, and reality, the book stimulates reflection on what life is, how to face it, and how to deal with one’s feelings of guilt.

La grande rimozione, Roberto Grossi

★★★★☆

It is an essential comic book that effectively presents the situation of climate change, its urgency, and how to become aware of it and act collectively and individually before it is too late. Some of the panels, often compositions that compare two similar yet opposite situations, are brilliant and very effective. I hope it will be translated and receive the broadest possible distribution. I learned about this book thanks to the Coconino Festival held in my hometown this weekend. A small but well-executed exhibition was dedicated to this work.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, David Foster Wallace

★★★☆☆

(Tennis, tv, trigonometria, tornado e altre cose divertenti che non farò mai più, Minimum fax)

Three stories stand out: DFW’s youth tennis, his visit to the Illinois State Fair, and his account of his experience following David Lynch as a director. The one about American TV started well but quickly became too US-centric to follow. DFW, however, is always a joy to read.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales, Oliver Sacks

★★★☆☆

(L’uomo che scambio sua moglie per un cappello, Adelphi)

Quoting a comment on Goodreads, to which I have nothing to add: “This book has many fascinating studies of neurological disorders, and the stories behind the patients are easily understood and, in many cases, enthralling. However, Dr. Sacks seems to give his readers too much credit when he throws off “hyperagnosia”, “Korsokovian”, and “meningioma” like he assumes we had read an entire neurology textbook before picking this one up.”

Source code, by Bill Gates

★★★★☆

Autobiography of Bill Gates from early childhood to the early steps of Microsoft. An interesting work for many reasons, not the least of which is that I find myself in many of the traits and passions of young Gates, on an almost disturbing level. One of the main characters recounts a key moment: the advent of micro and personal computers, and how they changed everything.

Papyrus, by Irene Vallejo

★★★★☆

Papyrus by Irene Vallejo (originally titled “El infinito en un junco” in Spanish) is a fascinating work about the history of books in antiquity. I think Vallejo did an excellent job telling the history of writing and books in an accessible yet scholarly way. Her ability to weave historical facts with interesting anecdotes makes the text engaging. As I understand, the autobiographical digressions that sometimes can annoy the reader are characteristic of her style - she uses her personal experience as a bridge to connect modern readers with the ancient world. The book is particularly strong when describing how texts survived through centuries thanks to dedicated copyists, libraries like Alexandria, and the transition from papyrus scrolls to codices (the ancestors of modern books).

Libera Università, by Tomaso Montanari

★★★★☆

Tomaso Montanari is a lucid and sharp thinker; this text proves it. By the author’s admission, this is a militant, non-technical work. No solutions are offered to the many problems of Italian universities; that is not the goal (albeit one of his own texts on the subject would be interesting). The importance of a clear separation between the tertiary education system and executive power is emphasized more than ever in a season such as the current one, dominated by parties that hark back to totalitarian ideologies. I found the chapter about Italian telematic universities and how they’re encouraged and leveraged by at least parts of the executive power fascinating.

Cambiare la storia, by Adriano Prosperi

★★★★☆

Is human history editable? One way people have tried to change the historical course of humanity is by fabricating fakes. There is no shortage of examples; in this book, Adriano Prosperi focuses on a few in particular—the Donation of Constantine, perhaps the most famous among historical fakes. The second case concerns the historical inventions of the visionary Annio da Viterbo, who rewrote world history, starting with the Flood and prophesying the place and date of the apocalypse. One finds its model in the false chronicles and fake archaeological finds of seventeenth-century Granada, where moriscos threatened with expulsion from Spain invented the existence of a very ancient presence of Christian Arabs who came to Spain before St. James. But the most disturbing of the examples is the fourth, that of the “Protocols of the Elder Saviors of Zion,” notoriously false yet still widespread and operating. Changing or negating history does not pertain to the modern day; it has always been part of the process.

Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, by Ben Montgomery

★★★☆☆

(La signora degli Appalachi, Terre di mezzo)

“Grandma Gatewood’s Walk” by Ben Montgomery tells the remarkable true story of Emma Gatewood, who, at age 67, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail solo in 1955. After enduring decades of domestic abuse and raising 11 children, Emma left home with minimal supplies—wearing Keds sneakers and carrying only a tiny denim bag with necessities. She told her family she was “going for a walk” without revealing her ambitious 2,050-mile journey from Georgia to Maine. The book weaves Emma’s extraordinary hike together with her complicated personal history, highlighting her physical resilience and mental determination. Montgomery reveals how her journey captured America’s imagination, bringing significant publicity to the then-obscure Appalachian Trail. Emma’s accomplishments established her as a pioneering figure in hiking and inspired generations of hikers, particularly women. The book portrays her as a hiking legend and a symbol of perseverance who found freedom and purpose in nature after a life of hardship.

Emma Gatewood was genuinely revolutionary in what we now recognize as ultralight hiking philosophy decades before it became a formal movement. While experienced hikers of her era typically carried 30+ pounds of gear, Emma completed the entire Appalachian Trail with a homemade denim bag containing minimal essentials—a change of clothes, a shower curtain for shelter, some food, and little else. Her choice to wear simple Keds sneakers instead of heavy hiking boots was remarkably ahead of her time. What makes her achievement even more extraordinary is the context—she had no GPS, no specialized lightweight equipment, no online trail forums, and minimal trail markings compared to today. The Appalachian Trail was rougher and less developed in 1955, with fewer shelters and support infrastructure. Her approach embodied the core ultralight philosophy: bring only what you need, rely on your knowledge and adaptability rather than gear, and understand that mental fortitude often matters more than equipment. Emma proved that age, gender, and expensive gear were not prerequisites for tackling ambitious wilderness challenges.

The death of Ivan Ilyc, by Lev Tolstoy

★★★★☆

(La morte di Ivan Ilyc, Feltrinelli)

This work is a potent warning against the superficiality of life and a call to seek a more authentic and conscious existence. The main themes (and there are many for a booklet of a few pages, but that is what can be achieved by a giant of literature) are the inevitability of death, the hypocrisy of “civilized” society, alienation and loneliness, the meaning of life, and redemption through suffering. It is one of Tolstoy’s minor works, the philosophical-religious period from his second and last periods. Admirable.

La scomparsa di Majorana, by Leonardo Sascia

★★★☆☆

Since March 26, 1938, traces have been lost, between his departure and arrival on a sea voyage from Palermo to Naples, of the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist Ettore Majorana, whom Fermi would not hesitate to call a genius of the stature of Galileo and Newton. Suicide, as the investigators of the time want to believe and let belief, or voluntary escape from the world and the terrible fates that such a mind may have read into the future and the near future of science? In this admittedly speculative work, Sascia favours the latter. Sciascia’s arguments are intriguing but not entirely convincing to me. The value of this work lies in Majorana’s biography, which is well-documented and told. One is left wondering what Majorana could have achieved in his career if he hadn’t fled from it.

The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

★★★★☆

(La Luna e i Falò, Edimedia)

The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese is a novel published in 1950 and is considered his masterpiece. The book explores several key themes, including:

• Return and Memory: The protagonist, Anguilla, returns to his hometown in the Langhe after years of absence. The contrast between past and present becomes a central element of the narrative.
• Identity and Sense of Belonging: As an orphan who sought fortune in America, Anguilla questions his roots and whether he truly belongs anywhere.
• War and Its Consequences: In the aftermath of World War II, the novel highlights the scars left by the conflict, mainly focusing on the Italian Resistance and its impact on people and the land.
• Myth and Disillusionment: The moon and the bonfires symbolically represent the contrast between dreams and reality, between the desire for something more significant and the harsh truth of rural life.
• The Human Condition and the Inescapability of Fate – Pavese explores themes of solitude and the search for meaning, often portraying life with a melancholic and fatalistic outlook.

The novel is intensely autobiographical and reflects Pavese’s existential concerns, offering a universal meditation on memory, identity, and the pain of existence.

This village where I was born, I believed for a long time to be the whole world. Now that I have indeed seen the world and know that it is made up of many small villages, I’m not sure if, as a boy, I was really that wrong.

Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa

★★★☆☆

(Ogni mattina a Jenin, Feltrinelli)

I received this novel as a Christmas present from my kids, and I’m grateful to them for this powerful, passionate, eye-opening novel. Set against one of the twentieth century’s most intractable political conflicts, Mornings in Jenin is a deeply human novel of history, identity, friendship, love, terrorism, surrender, courage, and hope. Its power forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining conflicts of our lifetimes.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

The heartbeat of the wild, by David Quammen

★★★☆☆

(Il cuore selvaggio della natura, Adelphi)

An annotated collection of memorable field reports written for National Geographic over nearly three decades by David Quemmen.

Human beings are the problem on this planet, but they are also the solution.

As AI generated content becomes the norm, I believe that human-generated content and raw thoughts and emotion will become more valuable. In many ways, I’d rather read a raw, unproduced, and scrappy blog post with grammatical mistakes over perfectly generated content that serves little value.

– Armeet Singh Jatyani, Importance of Writing

Every machine serves a purpose. People need purpose. The temptation to become the machine is higher than ever. The promise of the machine is alluring. If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here. If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal, I will make it.

[..] You’re not a machine. You’re a person. Play to your strengths. Be sharp and strategic like a scalpel, not blunt like a mallet. Stop fetishizing the grind. Dream bigger.

– Armeet Singh Jatyani, Becoming the Machine

During my usual morning walk today, I went to look for it, and there it was, an interview I had done in 2021 that I had completely forgotten about. I got over the initial embarrassment (it’s always strange to hear your own voice) and resisted the temptation to turn it off, listening to it all the way through. I must admit that it captures that moment in my professional life, and much of the content is still relevant, especially regarding my experience as an open-source author and maintainer and my transition from C# to Python and back.

I found copies of the podcast on many platforms, including a YouTube video (we actually video recorded it, who knew!), but they are all in Italian. I fed the video to MacWhisper, which transcribed it; I then asked Claude to translate it into English, removing pauses and repetitions; and finally, I ran it through Grammarly for a grammatical check. That’s what AI allows today: half an hour to go from an Italian audio podcast to a full English transcript, and that’s including a manual, pedantic review of Grammarly suggestions.

What follows is the full transcript, in English, of that 2021 interview. We touch on a variety of topics, including Python for .NET Developers, functional programming in Python, F#, and C#, the Eve REST framework and Flask, electronic invoicing, my open-source experience as an author and maintainer in both ecosystems, cross-platform development, and advice to newcomers.

I don’t really know how or why Marco found this relic of mine on Spotify, and I’m not brave enough to ask, but I’m grateful he dug it up. Also, many thanks to Mauro Servienti for hosting the interview.

DotNet Podcast - Interview with Nicola Iarocci (2021)

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new episode of DotNet Podcast, the Italian podcast dedicated to Microsoft technologies and more. You can find us on all major social platforms and podcasting services; all links are on our website, dotnetpodcast.com. Today we’re talking about Python and Eve (or Pyrrest) and, why not, electronic invoicing for .NET.

Today I have the pleasure of having Nicola Iaroci with me. I met Nicola at the Italian edition of SoCraTes in Rimini a few years ago. Nicola is the classic jack of all trades: developer, entrepreneur, fitness enthusiast, consultant, open-source lover, Microsoft MVP, MongoDB Master, and probably something else I’ve forgotten, because the list is very long. In the open source world, he’s known primarily for Eve (we’ll have him explain how to pronounce it), a REST framework for Python, and Electronic Invoicing .NET. I almost forgot: if you want to know anything about how Git works, Nicola knows it all.

Welcome Nicola! Did I forget anything?

Hi, thanks, welcome everyone. Well, no, I’d say probably yes, but I can’t tell you what, so I’d say the introduction is perfect. Thanks.

This podcast has always been oriented toward the .NET world, though lately we’re branching out a bit into various technologies and even topics not necessarily technical. But assuming our listeners are primarily .NET developers, briefly, what is Python, and why should or could a C# .NET developer be interested?

Sure, so first of all, Python fundamentally, let’s say from a general point of view, is not that different from the languages we’re used to in the .NET world, particularly C#, in the sense that it’s still a high-level language, object-oriented from its foundations, let’s say, from its roots. The main difference, perhaps, is that it’s fundamentally interpreted, so there’s an interpreter that executes the language and programs, although it’s also possible to do JIT compilation, especially for performance reasons.

I’ll add an important note because people generally think that a dynamic language is not strongly typed, which is not true. Python is a strongly typed language, but it has dynamic semantics, so type checking is still possible. I always clarify this because those coming from C-derived languages often think it’s very similar to JavaScript, when in reality, there are clear differences.

It’s certainly a language designed to be more approachable for a general programmer or even a beginner, and this probably also explains why it’s had such success, I’d say almost incredible success, for example, in the world of scientific research, numerical computing, in the financial world and for those who need to do numerical analysis. Because, among other things, in that particular area it’s a language where performance is excellent, not because Python is a fast language (it’s not at all, being interpreted), but a very beautiful thing about Python is that you can write its libraries in C, with bindings that practically allow you to use libraries written in C as if they were Python libraries.

And this is the trick that allowed all these tools for numerical, scientific, and financial analysis to be written in a language that’s simple to grasp, even for those who perhaps aren’t born developers like us. For example, think of a researcher, a scientist locked in their laboratory who can understand Python, approach programming and immediately have powerful tools available, yet the language remains easily readable and understandable. It’s a perfect language, for example, for learning to program in general.

Then what else? Like our .NET languages, it obviously supports modules and packages. There’s an equivalent to NuGet: PyPI, where you can now find hundreds of thousands of packages to install.

One thing that personally interested me a lot about Python when I started studying it was the fact that it was cross-platform from the beginning. It was a language that, when I started studying, was already twenty years old, so very mature. The base class library, or something like that, so it comes with a lot of included material, a bit like .NET at this point with .NET Core. Practically, whatever you want to do, there’s certainly a standard way that allows you to do it.

The fact that it was cross-platform for me then was very interesting, because I came from the .NET ecosystem, which, when I started looking at Python about 10 years ago, was still absolutely out of the question. Then the world is made to change rapidly; it would also be nice if you let me tell you what happened in those years, but we probably don’t have time. But fundamentally, yes, the fact that it was open source from the beginning, 20 years ago, I really liked a lot.

I must admit that in those years we fundamentally had to port our application, desktop applications, standalone, networked applications, and I was a bit frustrated by let’s say the old Microsoft world, to be clear, which sounds strange coming from a Microsoft MVP, but this is also to tell why I became a Microsoft MVP after having abandoned Microsoft, I must say also quite disappointed, and I moved to the Python world. Then I was noticed in the Python world by Microsoft people, who sort of recruited me into this part of the MVP world.

Then I actually went back to doing a lot of C#, F#, in short, working in the .NET world. Actually, if I have to be honest, nowadays about 75-80% of my work is in C# and F#, and the remaining 20% is maintenance of my open-source Python packages.

So yes, let’s say this: Python, personally, gave me new perspectives to answer your question. You know, when you’re always inside, you always drink from the same source, you always drink the same water, and certainly it’s excellent water, but you don’t know the other flavors, the other tastes.

I’ll give you a trivial example: in C#, historically (keep in mind that I’m a certain age, so I started writing C# really too many years ago), I remember this episode that always marked me. They had always taught me not to use try-catch if possible because exceptions in .NET were performance problems; it was a bad practice. In the Python world, it’s exactly the opposite: you write code without too many guards, you focus on the logic that solves the problem, and you catch and handle errors as needed.

Going back to the C# world, I started using this thing a lot in Python and used it aggressively, even to the dismay of my colleagues who had stayed in the world. And this is simply an example. Then, in the meantime, obviously, in these 10-15 years, try-catch is no longer a problem like it was 15 years ago.

I brought some things from the Zen of Python, a kind of decalogue that Python programmers try to follow, into the C# world. For example, “Explicit is better than implicit,” which is a classic of the Python world. So, rather than write one more line of code, make your intention exactly clear, rather than hiding things behind too many automagical things.

So, all these little things here. Now, yes, the .NET world has given us a lot, it’s not even worth saying. Actually, now they’ll do the same thing here, too. When I moved there, and especially there, I think C# was already very mature. So I found myself… I remember another thing: when, for the first time, I didn’t understand how a REST call worked in Python, and I realized I could go to GitHub to see the source code of the framework I was using, which was Flask.

It’s a bit like if I, 15 or 10-12 years ago, had been able to look at the ASP.NET source code to understand exactly why things weren’t working as I thought they should. That thing for me was, the English would say, paradigmatic. It really opened my heart, and I understood that was the world I wanted to be in. Then you see, many of these arguments are a bit, let’s say, weak today because C# and .NET are now fully open source. But better this way, thank God. A lot has changed in recent years.

Nicola has a t-shirt I couldn’t see well at first; it has the Superman logo, but it’s actually an F with a hashtag, so it’s an F# t-shirt. Is there a relationship between the functional world and Python, or is Python a traditional object-oriented world, let’s call it that?

Well, that’s a good question. Actually, Python was born entirely and purely object-oriented. So anything you use in Python is an object, but it has a strong predisposition also toward functional programming, let’s say. I have to be honest: if I want to do good quality functional programming, F# is a thousand times better than Python, but you can certainly do it.

Let’s say this is probably interesting as well. I wouldn’t have arrived at F# (let’s say) if I hadn’t gone through Python. Always for the discussions I was telling you about before, the approach in Python is to simplify things, break them down into… well, these are good practices used in all programming languages. But there’s a tendency, let’s say, to use functions rather than magic classes that incorporate state, for example.

In Python, it’s quite common, even if not everyone does it, because, being a complete object-oriented language, you can perfectly well maintain state inside objects as you would in a C# class, in a classic way. But you will surely have noticed, and I think the listeners too, that the trend in C#, as well as in recent versions, is toward functional programming in a manner I’d say is almost impetuous, so records, immutables, many other things like enhanced lambdas, etc., etc.

So, coming back to the .NET world from Python, I became much more curious about F # than I had been 10 years ago. So yes, in Python you can do decent functional programming and organize your code in a functional way, but it’s certainly a language that remains object-oriented, let’s say, in its orientation.

And it’s not even, I have to tell you the truth, compared to C#, which has been adopting so much from F# in the last two or three versions, Python is not making this huge effort to become functional, and in this, I have to say I quite agree. I really like the evolution of C#, especially for me, who also obviously does F#. I think I would really like also like to know how to say, I’ve also tried actually in some conferences to do outreach in this sense, to encourage the C# developer to go toward functional, and also to illustrate F#, the principles of F#.

But I also appreciate the fact that in the Python world, they said, “ok, Python at its heart is an object-oriented language and its focus is there, let’s improve that type of paradigm. There are other languages that do well. And in the .NET world, this is very true: there’s C#, and we have the enormous fortune of also having F#.

Now there’s been an attempt at hybridization, let’s say, or rather to bring into the C# world everything that’s beautiful about the functional world, which sure is appreciable. I’m happy, I’m already using it a lot. But I think it can also create a lot of confusion for a newcomer to the language, who perhaps comes from object-oriented programming and finds themselves with many functional things and doesn’t quite understand what to do.

I adore the latest versions of C#, and I’m very happy about it, but what is the specific direction of C#?

Yes, I also have a sort of adoration for the latest version of C#, but I realize that having behind me… I started writing C# code in 1999 with Beta 1 of the .NET Framework. So I’ve been through all of them, so for me, the novelties are small things compared to the twenty years that have passed. I realize that the problem might be that, for a new developer who arrives today, they face, fundamentally, an almost insurmountable mountain to climb.

That’s exactly what I meant, so adding then also, let’s say, this cognitive weight. One could ask oneself why can’t I use a class instead of a record, for example, but the same thing, what’s the fundamental difference? Yes, there are reasons, but one of the really strong things about Python is its ease of access for those starting in programming.

I’ve seen that Microsoft is making huge efforts in this regard, with video series on YouTube and sites to welcome people to C#. And I, in particular, who come from the world, I’m let’s say with feet in both camps, so I’m well known in the Python world too, so much so that I’ve also done presentations where I present Python to the C# programmer and C# and .NET to the Python programmer.

Especially now that C# is finally cross-platform and open source, it becomes much more… before, it was unthinkable to talk to a Python programmer about learning C#, which was only Windows and only .NET Framework, standalone, etc. It was really unthinkable. Now some cracks are opening, I’m trying to slip in there, but it’s very hard because clearly we have let’s say an image, we’re known as dotNetters in quotes for enterprise, for PA… and heavy stuff that’s installed on Windows, the GAC, all these problems that existed in the Windows world.

Many times, making people understand “look, now you can take a Linux machine and run a web application written in C# with the same ease as you would with Node or Python” is really a message that leaves people open-mouthed, and they don’t believe it, you have to show them. So the work to be done on our part is really a lot.

You touched on Python at the beginning of the discussion, saying, if I remember correctly, you used Flask as a framework, which I assume is a sort of counterpart to ASP.NET. More or less? What relationship is there between Flask, ASP.NET, Eve and the REST world in general? And why did you feel the need to write a framework for REST for Python?

Well, that’s an excellent question. When I came to Python, there was a framework called Django, which was very widely used and very famous, and did the equivalent of a modern ASP.NET, an ASP.NET Core. But it was too complex, it was exactly the classic behemoth in the .NET style, because I’m talking about the old way, where you had to take everything that came or what you needed. What I needed was to practically implement the equivalent of a Web API application we have in the .NET world, so the controller… well, there’s no concept of controllers, but it’s the classic REST API concept.

So, Flask actually defines itself as a REST API, but it’s not a true Web API. It’s more of a .NET type framework. When I explain to C# programmers what exactly Eve is, I make this kind of comparison: imagine a Web API .NET, well, Eve gives you that with the addition that there was this attempt to make it very easy to put online when you need an API that’s basically a front-end for a database, so not much business logic but CRUD operations and things like that.

So, in this sense natively, Eve, besides providing the REST interface toward clients which by the way is strongly opinionated (that is, keep in mind that when I wrote Eve it actually was born as an internal project for my company, so we knew exactly that a POST would create a record, a PUT would replace, a PATCH would modify), I didn’t create a framework that lets you do whatever you want, precise choices were made about how verbs work, how modifications work.

And fundamentally, if that’s okay with you, my framework probably lets you work agilely and quickly. If you don’t agree, use Flask or another framework, or build your own. And so yes, I’d say the relationship is this: Flask could be, let’s say, the core of a Web API. Look, it comes to mind now with .NET 6 this new interesting feature, which are the minimal APIs.

If you take the Flask homepage and look at the quick start example, it’s maybe ten lines of code, and you take a snippet that Microsoft is publishing on its social media (David Fowler comes to mind on Twitter; every now and then, he posts screenshots of these minimal APIs), they’re almost overlapping, it’s incredible, right?

And so the work they’re doing now in .NET 6 with minimal APIs is to remove from the logic let’s say MVC and everything that was behind it, remove the routing and those things from verb management and then put it all in your hands so that you can make a pure API without the behemoth, without having to create a controller and so on.

So, Flask practically gives you that base that we’ll now have in .NET 6. So, this, and minimal APIs are something that in my opinion can be very interesting for those who want to start using C# for example to make Web APIs, because when I came from C# I had the whole behemoth world let’s say to manage and I found Flask which gave me the building blocks to build what I wanted, it was exactly the reason why I went to use Flask and Python.

So finally in .NET 6 we’ll have something very similar and it’s really impressive to compare Node code, Python code with Flask and .NET 6 minimal API code and see that the effort is very evident from Microsoft to make it interesting also for those coming from other stacks where all that, sorry if I repeat myself (I call it the behemoth), all that complication… so you have to have a controller, you have to have a view, you have to make a site, you have to have in short the data layer, all these affairs that certainly come from data user, among these and so on, are being somewhat thinned out to make everything lighter and it will be very interesting in my opinion.

Exactly. One thing I noticed is that, finally, for the first time with .NET 6, the empty project template is truly empty.

Exactly, Flask has been like that for me: you just need a .py file with your four lines of API initialization, and then a nice little function that responds to a GET, and you’re done. Now we’ll have this in .NET 6 too, which is really interesting to me. Hopefully, then we’ll be able to make the rest of the world understand that .NET is no longer what it was 10 or 15 years ago, and here I emphasize this is the big commitment, in my opinion, the real challenge to win: communication.

But I have to say that on this I’m optimistic for another reason and that’s performance, that is the performance of .NET Core, multi-framework, cross-platform are really interesting and this is the reason why I went back to doing a lot of C# actually, because with .NET Core I have cross-platform and performance that I don’t have in Python and now I’m also starting to have a language, a stack that’s agile and very similar to what I used in Python, what I use in Python or in Node for example. But let’s not talk about Node, otherwise we’ll have a classic flame war.

Ok, in all of this, how does Electronic Invoicing .NET fit in?

Well, Electronic Invoicing is also here, the result of my Python experience, that is, in Python I embraced open source to the point of becoming the first creator and then maintainer of some open source projects, and I saw the incredible potential that comes with letting’s say, the benefits you have from making your code public.

And so going back to work in .NET (we’re talking about 2014-2015, because electronic invoicing, it must be said, is something that was imposed by law, I think in 2019, now I don’t remember, but actually the technical specifications were already in place for some years for the public administration world). So we had to do this thing internally.

Fundamentally, for those who don’t know the product, FatturaElettronica.NET is simply a deserializer and serializer of electronic invoices that puts in your hands an instance of a class that represents the electronic invoice and that, very handily, also forces you to validate it according to the technical specifications. So you can, before submitting your electronic invoice to the Revenue Agency, etc., already know whether it will be accepted, identify any errors, and tell your user how to correct them. This is the version in a nutshell.

And so when we did this and I started working on this project I proposed to colleagues to try to leave it as open source because it was evidently something that would become useful certainly to a niche compared to Eve or Cerberus which is another project I have, but because meanwhile it’s only dedicated to the Italian public and not to the whole planet let’s say, but also certainly only to those who develop management software etc., etc.

But why not? It seemed to me an interesting little game, also because, I’ll tell you the truth, it may seem a bit naive on my part, but it seemed to me the way to show and make .NET developers understand that open source, even from us peons, is perfectly possible. If you have an interesting project that can be useful, you can do it even if you come from the let’s call it closed enterprise world, like that of .NET, and it seemed to me a way to give an example and encourage others to take the same step.

In short, at the beginning, it remained quiet for two or three years, and we used it only by us and four other unfortunate souls like us. Gradually it gained traction, it clearly became a very important thing when the law then imposed electronic invoicing and I must say we had the advantage, you see there too, of being a project that by then was already a few years old (it was from 2015 I think I left it open source), it was already mature enough to be adopted by those who were panicking because they found themselves with three months to implement something and so after that contributors arrived.

The thing about the whole Electronic Invoicing project that gives me the most satisfaction is the fact that there are .NET developers and it’s evident from how they make pull requests and how they contribute to the code that they’ve never done it before, but with enthusiasm and obviously out of necessity they get to work, they throw themselves into it and they’ve also contributed pieces of code that have proven very important.

So in my small way, in the .NET world, what usually happens in other worlds I come from, or rather that I return to, so Python, is happening.

This is a fascinating thing that recently happened to me too because I have several open source projects, one recently… a guy who I later discovered was Australian started opening issues, then a couple of pull requests and then more and now I’m evaluating within myself whether to make him a maintainer because he’s contributing in a very important way and if the project hadn’t originally been open source because it didn’t need to be open source, originally there wouldn’t have been all the contributions that I honestly had never thought of, they didn’t make much sense.

Absolutely, I confirm and my experience too. To give a practical example on Electronic Invoicing, a guy comes to mind who contributed… I think I implemented serialization in JSON, in addition to XML, for these electronic invoices, but I wasn’t at all interested in deserialization. It’s a guy… moreover, it’s also the contract, the pull request arrived with this feature completely implemented, and so now I support bidirectional JSON or the famous digital signatures, which are a very complex topic.

Electronic invoices can be sent as pure XML or with a digital signature. Actually the large part of those features was contributed from the outside. They’re important features you see that I didn’t work on, clearly, then I contributed to quality control, everything you want, but giving me so much value to the project and obviously to the community.

And among these contributors, there are precisely new contributors who, often precisely because of their enthusiasm, are the ones who in the end contribute the most, with also those more interesting features.

If I have a minute to tell another episode that comes to mind, in Eve, there was this guy. I had already been on GitHub for 4-5 years; it was going very well, and it had widespread adoption, which I was very proud of. After which, this pull request from this guy arrives, with, I remember, something like 800 code changes, so a monster pull request. Going to look at them, they were all changes to comments, what in Python are called docstrings, they’re practically the inline documentation that you put as a comment that then serves developers to understand your code.

They were full of typos and errors because I’m obviously not a native English speaker, so there were grammatical errors, typos, and other issues. It was super embarrassing because I realized that my code with all my errors had been seen by who knows how many tens of thousands of programmers, who knows how many laughs they had at my expense.

But the beautiful thing about this contribution was that he wrote to me, “look, I’m not an expert programmer, so I thought of contributing in this way. And from that day, the Eve documentation has enormously improved, so that a contribution which is not a code contribution, from an absolute non-expert for me personally, for the whole project, has had and still has an immense value.

So this is also a message, I always tell this episode. There are opportunities to contribute in a significant way for anyone, from the super programmer (the famous “10x developer” if you also say it in Italian), but also those who have just started can help and indeed, they should be encouraged because they’re the ones who have so much enthusiasm, among you who then give them confidence, the problem is that after a while being a maintainer becomes very demanding and you start to delegate to someone who I’m not saying replaces you, but maybe even yes.

In fact, the next question is precisely that: if I understood correctly, both open source projects have some relationship with your work, but obviously, the cognitive and managerial load is significantly higher than what your work would generate. So what is your experience in the world of open source governance, and in general, managing projects that start maybe a bit like, I don’t know, what we could call a playground, and then explode in your hands, and you say, “oh my God, now what do I do?”

Yes, it’s a gigantic problem actually because with Eve, thank God, we’ve now reached a maturity and stability of the framework that allows me to live quite on my laurels, but attention, simply because I chose that the project is mature and stable, and I don’t want to take it, say, to a version 2.0. If I were like .NET can be forced every year to make a new major release, it would obviously be my job 24 hours a day.

I also confess that to solve this problem I also tried to make Eve somehow profitable, to have an income from the project itself through donations, like “buy me a coffee”, but not with the objective of becoming full-time living, but with the objective of being able to pay myself half a day of work per week to dedicate explosively to the project, because if I could have dedicated, say, every Friday 8 hours to open source, you would certainly have a project 10 times more beautiful than what it has now, same thing with Cerberus, same thing with Electronic Invoicing.

As you can imagine, this thing didn’t have much success because everyone is very good at installing packages, but when they have to put their hands in their wallets, they’re much less good at it. Maybe there was gratitude for receiving this, which is very pleasant, but the long-term strategy is missing… another topic; we don’t want to discuss now how to maintain…

There comes a moment when the cognitive commitment is really great, you have so much other business and other work types to deal with, and it becomes a problem. The solution, for example, I was lucky because, a bit like what happened to you, one of these contributors, gradually, I really let him, even in a somewhat sly way, I let him take control, but it started with minimal pull requests, then he gained courage, I sort of nurtured him.

In the end when I was certain he knew the codebase very well, he was also an expert, in short fundamentally Cerberus I left in his hands 100%, so I follow it from afar, I receive email notifications, if he has some important modification to make he asks me for advice, but actually he even has the rights to publish updates and so let’s say now for me I’m simply a father watching from afar the child grow, so to speak.

For Eve, I’m still the main maintainer, but as I tell you, the choice of Eve was perhaps made with the idea of being able to continue living and earning, let’s say, my salary. It was ok. The product is mature. From now on, we accept pull requests for bug fixes or mature new features that make sense to incorporate, but I don’t foresee further development in any direction.

Electronic Invoicing, for me, is strategic because we use it every day in the company; we ultimately make management software, so there I remain the maintainer, and I do it gladly because there’s a necessity.

So, in general, hopefully in the .NET world too, we’ll arrive at this… so, many have told me “how nice, I’ll definitely make a donation, we’ll make a donation for Electronic Invoicing because we use it in the company”, I think not even one has arrived. So in this certainly the .NET world still has to mature and become aware of the fact that a long-term investment for a product you use every day and that gives you income in the end somehow (otherwise you wouldn’t use it), it makes sense to think about contributing to the long life of the project to not risk finding yourself at a certain point with the maintainer who took the motorcycle and went to the Himalayas to climb and you have a critical project maybe that’s no longer updated, that has security problems, etc. On this, there’s work to do.

Ok, to conclude, last two quick questions. Still staying in the open source world, if you had to give advice to someone who wants to start an open source project and advice to someone who wants to contribute to an open source project.

Yes. So, for those who want to start, I’d say don’t worry. In the sense that, as you said before, there were projects you had put open source that actually didn’t need to be. “They didn’t need to be open source.” This is, the perception is a problem of really, I can’t translate it into Italian, but it’s a problem of wrong perception, in the sense that actually there’s certainly someone on planet earth who has to solve the problem that you have to solve at that moment.

So even projects, if you want trivial small ones that serve little purpose, thanks to potential algorithms and tools, exposure from GitHub, from Google and so on, rest assured that if you’re doing a project for electronic invoicing, someone else has that problem. So the first thing is that the history of open source is full of projects born as hobby projects, put on GitHub almost like this for convenience, because this way I have a remote backup, which actually exploded in the hands of maintainers because they were successful.

But even if they weren’t successful, it serves you in the meantime to acquire the know-how, which is not small, and to gain experience in doing so and overcoming the shyness of sharing your code and showing it to the public. So, this is the other very important thing. My programming style has evolved a lot, thanks also to seeing what others do.

Sure, it can also be, how to say, sometimes not humiliating, I’d say, but certainly it puts you in your place when you see that your code has been refactored in a much more performant or more elegant way by others, but it’s there that you learn. It’s a bit of the discourse about always drinking water from the same place I was telling you about. So certainly I’d say first thing, don’t be afraid, throw anything on GitHub even if the code is not the best… sorry… don’t stay there to refine it, to clean it up, because maybe someone else will do it for you, who will even be grateful to you.

The other thing, probably, is… for those who want to start contributing instead, as I was saying before, there certainly are projects of the day that you use, even in professional frameworks… I’ll also make here, I’d say, another episode. When I was preparing a talk on Python and explaining how to use Python inside Visual Studio, which few people know, you can use all the Visual Studio features you’re used to to write Python code. I realized that the official documentation on the Microsoft Visual Studio site had some shortcomings in the pages dedicated to Python. And so what did I do? I made a fork of that documentation, which is now finally all on GitHub. I contributed a fix to this documentation.

And now, I don’t know if it’s still like this, but two or three years ago, if you went to the official Microsoft documentation for Python, you’d find my little face among the contributors. So there you go, I made a contribution even to an official Microsoft project. Free, because it’s the tool that I use every day.

I’m convinced that a large part of us developers have this experience of noticing a small error, a small problem, or a specification that doesn’t necessarily require an extremely complicated algorithm to solve. It can also be, as I was telling you in that other episode, a docstring, a comment with a typo. They’re all experiences that add up, that help you gain familiarity with the context, and so don’t start maybe by contributing a Fibonacci optimization, because I don’t know what.

So, really start from the trivial, from the simple, from what you do every day, because you know it very well and you’re already competent. After which, there’s time and a way to gain confidence; many of these my contributors, as I was telling you, start like this. Then, gradually, they gained courage and went to examine the deeper code, to solve the more complicated issues that I myself didn’t feel like going to look at, because I knew it was a hornet’s nest and the willing one arrived who did it in my place, riding the enthusiasm, which maybe I don’t have anymore, but they have it, the positive energy to use, to spend.

Good, very interesting, I agree completely. It’s one of the most common barriers to entering the open source world, precisely because itis tied to the idea that “I have to contribute,” and you have in your head that the contribution must be substantial, when, in the end, it’s often a small thing.

Exactly. The novice contributor, let’s say, is intimidated and thinks they should contribute something fundamental, but it doesn’t make sense to contribute. On the other hand you have a maintainer who is literally at the window waiting for those who contribute the small things to arrive, because they’re those, many small things that then are small things relatively (it’s the perception of the remote developer that it’s a small thing), it’s all work that you take away from the maintainer and that you take away from the community.

So even the very small thing I can’t wait for those more sought-after so-called small things to arrive. Actually, it has great value, as seen in the example of the 800 typos in the Eve documentation.

I thank you for your availability. It’s been a very pleasant chat. I hope to have you as a guest again, and as we shared before we started, we discussed an interesting topic that could be fitness for developers.

If you decide to do it, call me. Thanks so much to you and your whole team for what you do with this podcast. You do an excellent job.

Thanks so much, thanks so much and thanks again for your availability. See you next time, hello everyone.

Bye-bye, bye everyone, thanks.

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury—specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien’s anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien’s fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog.

Tolkien’s repulsion toward machines is well documented, with Isengard serving as the in-story metaphor for technology used wrongly. The canonical reference has always been the war machines used in World Wars I and II, which he witnessed with terror on the battlefield. I never imagined that he also glimpsed Isengard in his everyday life, and much closer to home: in the polluted streets of Oxford.

When I’m writing, I write. When I’m cooking, I cook. When I’m talking to someone, I put my phone away. The constant mental juggling that felt necessary before now feels exhausting. There’s something meditative about giving your full attention to a single task.

– 47nil

But I’m here for the closing piece of the soundtrack, the one you hear over the end credits: Don’t Go To Strangers, by JJ Cale. I immediately reached for Shazam while Serena looked it up on Spotify.

Now I’m spending this whole Sunday morning listening and reading about the artist and the Tulsa sound movement he originated. Despite his reticence and all-around low profile, he was no small feat and inspired many a great artist in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Just to get your bearings, he’s the original author of Cocaine later brought to fame by Eric Clapton.

Funny how you go watch a 2025 French movie only to end up digging an American artist from the 70s.

The lyrics may sound naive at first, but they’re not. Instead, they strike me as lucid and match my general feeling about what’s going on lately, the risks we’re taking as a society, and what we should do to move beyond and improve ourselves. The video is 100% Flea, and it’s adorable (it is directed by his daughter).

Digging further, I learned that Flea has a “trumpet album” coming out next year (apparently the trumpet was his first instrument), and that Nick Cave lent his voice to one of the tracks. In the process, I also learned about Cave’s trenchant opinion of RHCP, which thankfully doesn’t prevent Cave from admiring and respecting their bassist.

I don’t care about the act of politics. I think there is a much more transcendent place above it where there’s discourse to be had that can actually help humanity, and actually help us all to live harmoniously and productively in a way that’s healthy for the world. There’s a place where we meet, and it’s love.

– Flea

I am eager to listen to the new album.

AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor. The mistake people make is conflating the task with the role.

It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part. AI is doing something similar for us.

AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job

If you’re reading from the RSS feed or the newsletter, click here to see the actual image.

If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought.

– Daniel Lemire, Why Speed Matters.

For most of humankind, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every individual on the face of the earth has not existed. This designation stops at the border of a tribe or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.

— Paraphrased from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, 1952 (full quote and context)

I guess my beloved Star Trek future—post-scarcity, post-conflict, beyond divisions—is still far away.

Attending WPC is always exciting. The audience is large, the rooms are big and well-equipped, the energy is just right, and there’s always a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues. I especially enjoy seeing fellow Microsoft MVPs and speakers.

As promised, here is a link to the repository with the code I demonstrated; just read the README to get your bearings. Oh, and as expected, someone in the audience got nerd-sniped by that cj bash function I mentioned.

The woods, the jungle, the forest are the boundary between the wild and the civilized, a place of shelter and legendary fears, of hiding and losing oneself. A place of wonder and unease. [..] But what a mythical power lies in this tangle of nature, shadows, and roots, where the unconscious of the world can be found.

– Vinicio Capossela

Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself.

I’m a sucker for this nerdy stuff. I didn’t know Brian Eno designed the cover art for the whole Ambient series himself. Also, oh my God, take a look at the graphic score. It is mesmerizing. It looks like mysterious alien notation, gifted to us, humble hearthlings, to ponder¹.

How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports

I think of it [the usefulness of writing] like breathing but for ideas. We do so much reading all day—there should be a natural balance with producing words too. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…

Joe Boudreau in On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads, an article I agree 100% with.

The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case someone is interested.

Yeah, it is in Italian. I got a transcript from MacWhisper and then asked Claude to translate and clean it up. It did a pretty good job, so let me know if there’s any interest in an English transcript; I might post it here.

Speaking of English, I’ve started submitting to international events again, without any luck so far. The conference landscape has changed quite a bit, especially since the COVID break. I still get invited to local ones, while internationals have been elusive. I suspect my change in technology stack plays a role. It was relatively easy to speak abroad when I was into Python. With .NET, not so much. But again, I was into Python in the pre-COVID era, so it is hard to tell which factors are at play and what their weight is.

If you want to understand time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, and smooth even the sharpest edge.

wry writer

I’ll quote the most recent review on IMDb:

Robert’s life is gently lived and not without profound tragedy. The film evokes our own memories, little joys and sadnesses, discoveries, losses, and hopes, bringing grace to our self-reflection. The film is heartbreakingly beautiful. Acting, editing, and direction are just right. 

I read on Wikipedia that it’s doing very well, and deservedly so. Of course, I now regret not having known about or read the novel before watching the movie.

Update: I just found out that the title track of the original soundtrack is by Nick Cave.

Embarrassingly, just yesterday, I got a severe reprimand from Serena because I did not know or remember what day it was today. When I got back, I traced the source and found that the sign is actually available in several languages.

I’m fond of Flask. It was a breath of fresh air when it came out, and most of my Python open-source work is based on it.

The theory that people no longer read as much as they used to is put forward by people who no longer read as much as they used to.

– Francesco Farabegoli

I will use a Web API as an example project, and since I’ll be using curl live to query it, I’ll need to pipe responses through jq to obtain nicely formatted JSON for the audience.

The problem with jq is that it crashes on 400s or 500s because the response body is empty in those cases. Error responses are inherent to the demo, and crashes are not the most desirable thing during a presentation.

I cooked up a quick bash function that enhances curl and jq. It is called cj (curl + jq) and prevents crashes on errors, displays HTTP status codes with color-coded output (green for success, red for errors), and prettifies JSON responses.¹

As I fully expect someone in the audience to raise their hand and ask what the hell “cj” is, I’m posting it for reference so I can point them here if needed (Hi there!).

The function looks like this:

cj() {
    local response http_code body
    
    response=$(curl -s -w "\n%{http_code}" "$@")
    http_code=${response##*$'\n'}
    body=${response%$'\n'*}
    
    if [[ $http_code =~ ^2[0-9][0-9]$ ]]; then
        echo -e "\033[0;32mHTTP Code: $http_code\033[0m"
        echo "$body" | jq 2>/dev/null || echo "$body"
    else
        echo -e "\033[0;31mHTTP Code: $http_code\033[0m"
        echo -e "\033[0;31m$body\033[0m"
    fi
}

It currently sits at the bottom of my .zshrc file. I might turn it into a script in the future, but it’s probably going to be short-lived, so I’m happy with its current residence.

It’s pretty straightforward, but let’s break it down line by line.

cj() {

Defines a function named cj (short for “curl with jq”), which will wrap the standard curl command with automatic JSON formatting and colored output.

local response http_code body

Declares three local variables scoped to this function: response will store the full curl output, http_code will contain the HTTP status code, and body will hold the response body.

response=$(curl -s -w "\n%{http_code}" "$@")

Executes curl with the -s flag for silent mode (no progress bar), -w "\n%{http_code}" to append a newline and the HTTP status code at the end of the output, and "$@" to forward all arguments passed to the function. The entire output is captured in the response variable.

http_code=${response##*$'\n'}

Extracts the HTTP status code using Bash parameter expansion. The ##*$'\n' pattern removes everything up to and including the last newline, leaving only the status code. This is faster than using external commands like tail.

body=${response%$'\n'*}

Extracts the response body using parameter expansion. The %$'\n'* pattern removes the last newline and everything after it (the status code), leaving only the body content. This is more efficient than using, say, sed.

if [[ $http_code =~ ^2[0-9][0-9]$ ]]; then

Checks if the HTTP status code matches the pattern for success responses (2xx). The regex ^2[0-9][0-9]$ matches any three-digit number starting with 2.

echo -e "\033[0;32mHTTP Code: $http_code\033[0m"

Prints the HTTP status code in green color. The -e flag enables interpretation of backslash escapes, \033[0;32m is the ANSI code for green text, and \033[0m resets the color back to default.

echo "$body" | jq 2>/dev/null || echo "$body"

This one was fun. Attempts to format the response body as JSON using jq. If jq is not installed or the body isn’t valid JSON, stderr is redirected to /dev/null and the || operator triggers the fallback, which simply prints the raw body.

else
        echo -e "\033[0;31mHTTP Code: $http_code\033[0m"

For non-2xx responses (errors), prints the HTTP status code in red color using the ANSI code \033[0;31m.

echo -e "\033[0;31m$body\033[0m"

Prints the error response body also in red color, making errors immediately visible during the demo.

And that is all.

Musically, there’s no doubt that she and all her artists, four women, one man, all on vocals and playing multiple instruments, are talented. They rock a very sensual performance on stage².

As I was listening I thought: she reminds me of Rosalia and today, I immediately found a review that makes the comparison³, pointing out, however, that while Rosalia started with flamenco and moved towards quality pop, La Niña is doing the opposite, at least for now: her first album was more into high quality pop music, sang in Neapolitan but also with Italian lyrics while her second album dives into folklore and urban themes, packed with potential hits. The same review mentions the second artist who came to mind last night: Daniela Pes from Sardinia, who is certainly less accessible (and, in fact, has a smaller audience).

I’m listening to VANITAS, her first album, as I write. In some respects, it may be even more interesting than FURÈSTA, her second. Listen to them in order, and one can clearly see the path La Niña is on. I find it remarkable that she went all-in on folk music with her second work; an obvious choice intellectually, not so much from a marketing perspective. It paid off, though, as it is her second work that is growing her fanbase. The musical research on FURÈSTA is interesting as it doesn’t stop at the Neapolitan tradition but aims to embrace the whole southern Italy and Mediterranean scene. She is not afraid to dare.

I’m looking at her official videos too, and they are all visually stunning. I think La Niña has every chance of achieving international success. Not impossible, look at Rosalia’s trajectory.

Serena was ecstatic—a lovely evening overall.

These walks make my daily zen moment. Sometimes I come back and, if I try, I can’t remember what I was thinking about the whole time. Other times, however, and often, I mentally organize my day, or solve coding problems (or, more likely, study solutions to try later, once I’m at the keyboard). Sometimes I plan or dream about my future mountain trips, or remember past adventures, or plan motorcycle trips. Sometimes I listen to podcasts or music: there are mornings when I want to be on my own; others when listening to a well-told story is just what I need. In any case, once I get back, I feel refreshed, oxygenated, relaxed, and ready for the day’s work.

I rarely, if ever, skip my morning walk. I usually go out whatever the weather, but today, for the first time in a long, long time, I didn’t feel like braving the rain and the Bora wind (a condition that I usually enjoy), so I’m here writing about it instead.

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa

The ongoing discussion on HN is also worth reading (minus the AI slop complaints).

It is impossible to tell the story of electronic music without examining the pioneering beats, grooves, and performance aesthetics of Dusseldorf’s Kraftwerk and its founding member, Florian Schneider. Formed in 1970, the band brought an experimental approach to pop music, resulting in some of the most innovative and commercially successful electronic albums of the mid-1970s into the 1980s: Autobahn, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, and Computer World.

The Florian Schneider Collection is the first auction to feature a comprehensive collection of items from Florian’s personal life and career, providing a tantalizing glimpse at his and Kraftwerk’s often-enigmatic musical processes. The sale features over 450 lots of stage- and studio-played instruments and gear, clothing, artwork and furniture from Florian’s home and studios (as well as from Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio), bicycles, Kraftwerk memorabilia, and Florian’s extensive collection of historic woodwind and brass instruments (flutes, clarinets, oboes, saxophones, horns, tubas, and one-of-a-kind oddities).

My goodness, the items up for auction are all adorable. The idea of them being dispersed fills me with unspeakable sadness, although that doesn’t stop me from coveting any one of these pieces. I hope someone will acquire the entire lot and build a museum around it. In Düsseldorf, of course.

I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over. Today, I’d like to try to open things up a bit.

I’m surprised by how brilliantly Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, Hayao Miyazaki, and Miyazaki’s Spirited Away are packed into this talk.

This guide is intended to be a comprehensive look at the tech that Star Trek suggested to drive humanity forward ad astra per aspera. The emphasis is on innovations that don’t violate physics according to present consensus understanding. Go ahead and explore boldly.

Are We Trek Yet? – A guide for how close we are to Star Trek technology is a funny, revealing, and well-executed idea. It is somewhat comforting that at the time of this writing, eight of all the Star Trek technologies are readily available, and thirty-one are in progress. It only tracks Star Trek technology, though.

The most innovative and intriguing aspect of Star Trek is its society, depicted as a post-scarcity utopia where material needs are met without the use of money, allowing individuals to work for personal fulfillment and the betterment of humanity. The United Federation of Planets exemplifies this ideal, promoting equality, cooperation, and exploration among diverse species.

Many years ago, I read a writing on a wall that struck my young, fervent imagination so profoundly that I still remember it vividly: “To live in utopia, we must first dream it.”¹ We’re not a Star Trek society today, and we certainly aren’t heading in that direction, but I’ll keep dreaming.

“For decades, garbage collection in .NET was a background concern. It was mostly invisible to the everyday developer and was regarded as ‘automatic’ unless (or until) something slowed down the application. However, .NET 10 changes this perspective by making garbage collection (GC) a key component of application performance.”

What .NET 10 GC Changes Mean for Developers is a good in-depth article that explores the revolutionary garbage collection improvements in .NET 10, which deliver 2- 3x performance gains through seven key enhancements: escape analysis for stack allocation, DATAS enabled by default, flexible region sizing, delegate optimizations, intelligent write barrier elimination, enhanced devirtualization, and refined heap controls for containers.

My journey began on Thursday afternoon (September 18) by car, with the destination being Calalzo di Cadore. Three and a half hours of heavy traffic, followed by an overnight stay in a hostel. It proved to be a good decision: the next day, at 8 in the morning, I was fresh and rested, backpack on my shoulders, ready at the trailhead (my car was parked in the locality of Praciadelan, ten minutes from the hostel).

Day 1

From Praciadelan to Bivacco Tiziano, passing through Rifugio Chiggiato and forcella Jau della Tana

The ascent to Col Negro and Rifugio Chiggiato is in the woods, on a trail that’s almost always steep but comfortable. Nine hundred meters of elevation gain covered without stops, I felt in good shape. The fifteen-minute break I had planned at the refuge, I skipped it, a grave mistake. The presence of the two keepers having breakfast on the refuge terrace put me in a difficult situation. I didn’t want to sit there in their refuge without consuming anything, but I also didn’t want to move to the nearby meadow to avoid looking cheap. I had started just an hour and a half earlier, and it wasn’t the time to consume anything except maybe an energy bar, since the most challenging part awaited me.

After a brief traverse westward, more or less at mid-slope toward Forcella Jau della Tana, the trail immediately becomes technical and demanding. It overcomes a series of rock “blades”) under Cima Salina, with deep intermediate scree gullies. It jumps on stones and scree, with continuous ups and downs. I slipped once on small rocks going downhill; fortunately, there was no damage apart from a couple of tears to my shorts. In this area, I encountered a herd of chamois moving nimbly, not too far on the opposite scree. There’s so much silence on these mountains that it’s easy to hear their alarm whistle or notice their trampling on gravel or rocks. Once I reached the vertical line to the pass, the final ascent began, a very long and largely steel-cabled route with exposed sections. This section, especially in the final part near the summit, really put me to the test. The two sections together (Parking-Rifugio Chiggiato, then Chiggiato-Jau della Tana) cover approximately 1,600 meters of elevation gain, which I stupidly tackled almost without rest. Toward the end, I was getting dizzy with every few steps and/or pulls on the iron cables. I was in difficulty and didn’t expect it, so much so that, now almost at the summit, I consumed a second energy bar. From Rifugio Chiggiato to Jau della Tana, it took me no less than two hours and thirty minutes, possibly three.

From the pass, I could see Bivacco Tiziano, the day’s destination. From up there, it appears as little more than a red dot still distant, resting on a grassy ridge a few kilometers away and about five hundred meters of elevation loss downhill. A few meters from the summit, I met the first person, a Frenchman (I think) with a tent and a huge backpack. He came from Bivacco Musatti or thereabouts and asked me where he could find some water. I told him it was a long way down until the Chiggiato; no water until there. While I was resting at the pass, a very young and fit boy reached me. He had stopped to chat with the Frenchman (I could hear them chatting a couple of hundred meters below me). The boy told me that the Frenchman left (if I understood correctly, I was tired) France in April and was slowly hiking across all the Alps to reach Slovenia by the end of October. Crazy. The boy was headed to Bivacco Fantoni and was the vanguard of a group of four. He was “running” ahead to arrive early at Fantoni, which nowadays is “YouTube famous” since it has been recently rebuilt and is now an ultra-modern and very comfortable structure. We parted ways as I undertook my descent toward Tiziano. Slowly, I descended first on steep scree and then on mixed terrain of stone and meadow, navigating the ups and downs of the Lastoni delle Marmarole, and finally arrived at Bivacco Tiziano at about 4:30 PM. Bivacco Tiziano is situated in a stunning location, at the western edge of the Lastoni, with the Marmarole ridges behind and the door opening onto the Ansiei Valley, a thousand meters below, and the Dolomites to the north. You can admire the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, Cristallo, the Tofane, the Cadini di Misurina, and many other well-known groups and peaks.

As widely expected, there’s no water at Tiziano, and none is found along the entire route once you leave Chiggiato. I had brought an extra supply that was sufficient to prepare dinner and breakfast for the next day, certainly not to continue for another two days. At this point, I was worried. In the bivouac log, a good soul had described where to find it. Still, it wasn’t close, and to be honest, for a moment I considered the idea of giving up and heading down to the valley the next day, so exhausted I was, and especially worried about the lack of water on the rest of the route. I had dinner, recovered some strength, and then, with my headlamp on, sat-nav in my pocket, and two water bottles in hand, I headed toward a wall of slabs “striped” by what looked like water rivulets. These slabs were approximately 500 meters from the bivouac as the crow flies, but to reach them, you had to cover a certain elevation difference, first uphill and then downhill. Without a backpack, however, it seemed like flying. Dinner had reinvigorated me, and I got there without too much suffering except for a frontal fall tripping on a stone that cost me a bruise on my hand that still hurts today. Reaching the wall, I realized that to collect water, it was necessary to climb about ten meters up the slabs, near a small roof from which water dripped onto the slabs below, forming the striped lines visible from the bivouac. Fortunately, the slabs are easily climbable due to their adhesion, so I went up and slowly filled one container at a time. It took a long time to fill the three containers from that tiny trickle of water; moreover, each time I had to climb down to return to the ground, deposit the whole container, and climb back up to fill the next one (I feared that a full water bottle could slip down and break). The position was uncomfortable: my feet were resting in adhesion, one hand to hold myself in place, the other with my arm extended to fill the bottle slowly. The entire procedure took me an hour, so I returned to the bivouac when it was almost dark. At 8 PM, exhausted but happy, I got into my sleeping bag and fell asleep almost immediately. For some strange reason, falling asleep alone, in a tent or bivouac, in such remote and wild places, far from everyone, with only nature around, puts me at ease. It’s almost as if I were cradled by nature itself.

Day 2

From Bivacco Tiziano to Bivacco Voltolina

The most spectacular day. I exit the bivouac and brush my teeth while a young ibex watches me, perplexed, no more than twenty meters away. Having left Bivacco Tiziano, I enter Val Longa, where three more ibexes, one adult and two youngsters, graze peacefully and are not at all intimidated by my passing by. The ascent begins early, though, on the hydrographic left of Val Longa, and it’s as I expected: steep and, soon, technical. Steel cable sections (not marked on the map) help in the most exposed sections until you reach the ridge line, in an airy and spectacular position, with breathtaking panoramas all around. Looking down in the direction I climbed from, I see the bivouac I left about an hour ago, a tiny red tin can. The path follows the ridge line until it reaches a pass that gives high entrance to a new glacial basin, the Meduce de Fora. We’re very high, literally a step from the sky. Far below, at the entrance to the upper part of the basin, I can see the red of Bivacco Musatti, the intermediate destination of the day. The descent is initially easy on the high meadows until I reach the terminal scree, which is initially steep and treacherous. Here, toward the bottom of the basin, I spot other ibexes a few meters from me. Unlike the cautious chamois, ibexes have a haughty attitude: they observe you calmly, unimpressed, with those majestic horns and regal pose. They certainly are the kings of the great heights. I find Bivacco Musatti occupied by a gentleman and his son. They are from the local CAI branch and are conducting maintenance work on the bivouac. I rest nearby for about ten minutes and leave again, aware that the longest and most demanding section still awaits me.

The ascent along the slopes of Monte Mecol is immediately hard and equipped with steel cables in the most exposed sections. Again, you climb up to the summit ridge and the highest passes; otherwise, you can’t get through. This is, it seems to me, the salient characteristic of these Marmarole Mountains: every valley change, on the north face, involves steep climbs, up to the summit ridges, then crossings of airy passes, and finally rough descents. There’s no easy passage from one basin to the other. The path descends and then crosses the Meduce De Inze among large erratic boulders. One must follow the many but constantly attention-requiring signs (red-painted dots and “ometti”); on this terrain, it’s easy to get lost. You then climb again, steeply and at length, again with equipped sections, on the slopes of Croda Rotta until arriving, you guessed it, at an airy pass. Staying high at the foot of the summit walls, you go around two or three gorges and cross again at length to finally drop, always on difficult terrain and often with the help of steel cables, to Forcella Vanedel, the narrowest, steepest, and also most dangerous of all. Pay attention here not to unhook too early from the cable: if toward the north the usual steep scree descends, toward the south, right where feet rest upon arrival, there’s a precipice of several tens of meters. Also be careful not to follow the scree downhill: a new steel cable is ready to your left and continues the course on the left slabs, still for a long time but gradually descending, parallel to the scree of Forcella Vanedel (still equipped sections here) until reaching a greener area and finally a trail that leads to the head of Val Granda, which is visible much lower, and to the access to Val De Medo, suspended almost in the void, where the day’s destination, Bivacco Voltolina, is hidden. A very exposed passage on rock protects access to Val De Medo. This passage is perfectly equipped with cables and is perhaps the most beautiful along the entire tour.

Arriving in this valley hidden in the recesses of the Marmarole, no matter how tired, offers a magnificent sensation, also for the wonder of what opens before us. The bivouac can be seen in the distance, up high: one last effort to cover the last two to three hundred meters of elevation gain, and I can finally rest. I can already see that nobody is there: I will be alone for the night, once again. As the day before, I’m anxious about the water. I already imagine I’ll have to look for it among the walls surrounding the bivouac. The trail climbs through a low grove of larches (we’re at the extreme limit of the vegetation’s range), sometimes intersecting the dry bed of a stream, and sometimes running alongside it a hundred meters away. After a few hundred meters, I seem to hear the sound of flowing water. Where I am, you can no longer see the stream bed that was completely dry a few moments ago when I crossed it. I stand still for a moment listening: there’s no doubt, what I hear is water, and not little, flowing among the rocks. I leave the trail and head toward the sound. As I imagined, there’s an abundant water outcrop right in the stream bed, which, in this season, evidently, flows underground for most of the route. Enormous joy takes me. There’s a small waterfall, and there’s even a pool so big I could bathe in it. I drink all the water I have left, then fill the bottles, and all happy and watered, I cover the last kilometer that takes me to Voltolina. The conditions of this bivouac are worse than the previous one. There’s no broom, to begin with, which certainly doesn’t help keep it clean. There are no pillows, but there are mattresses and blankets, although partially eaten by critters. There’s the bivouac log, but a pen is missing to update it. I don’t have one with me, so I won’t be able to register my passage, which is a pity, also because I’ll probably be one of the last to pass here before winter. I don’t have to worry about water, so I can spend a couple of hours contemplating nature, taking in the majestic view that opens before me, and the silence at high altitude.

Day 3

From Bivacco Voltolina to Forcella Grande via Cengia del Doge, then to Forcella Piccola and return to Praciadelan, passing through Rifugi San Marco and Galassi

During the night, I was awakened by a loud crash, likely a landslide on the ridges behind or around the bivouac, possibly on the Piana del Scoter, which is located directly behind here. The descent from Voltolina is pleasant and enchanting, continuing until you arrive at the entrance to the famous Cengia del Doge. I hear the typical alarm whistle, I raise my head and see a group of chamois that, it seems to me, have just tackled the Cengia. The Cengia is about a kilometer of trail that exploits a very exposed ledge that cuts in half a very high vertical wall. Absence of vertigo and sure footing are required. It’s well secured with cables, except for a brief passage of about three meters, which, frankly, leaves me perplexed: it’s dangerous; a slip there would be fatal. From the Cengia, the gaze spans over the imposing slopes of Sorapiss opposite, beyond the deep and spectacular Val de San Vido. The Minazio Trail, which cuts horizontally across the southeastern spurs of Sorapiss, is clearly visible and is almost as stunning as the Cengia del Doge. I walked that trail nearly thirty years ago with Fabio (my brother) and Gianluca. Good memories. We were young.

The ledge exits into a trail that leads right to the head of Val De San Vido. Here you walk among larches and mountain pines (with some water!), passing under the famous Torre dei Sabbioni and finally reaching Forcella Grande. Here, the path abandons the wild north face of the Marmarole and descends toward Rifugio San Marco, which is managed and open in high season. When I pass, the managers are setting up for winter closure. I continue for Forcella Piccola, with a panorama over the valley of San Vito di Cadore and Monte Pelmo opposite. The path eventually crosses under the enormous south walls and then climbs to Forcella Piccola, where the Normal Route, which leads to the summit of Monte Antelao, begins. Many years ago, I was here in the same place on August 4 (!) to climb the Antelao summit, but I had to withdraw due to the snow that had fallen during a night storm. The climbs are over: from now on, only a long descent, passing from Rifugio Galassi on its last day of opening and continuing for six kilometers, first steep till Capanna degli Alpini, then four kilometers on Pian della Gravina until reaching the car again at Praciadelan and closing the loop.

I must admit that when I arrived at the car, I became emotional. The satisfaction of having completed this solo adventure, certainly the most demanding of all, filled me with joy. In terms of overall difficulty, the Translogorai comes close. Still, while in that case the difficulty is mainly due to its length, here on the Marmarole, it’s the combination of rugged and technical trails, difficult orientation, demanding elevation gains, exposed and un-equipped sections, lack of water, and isolation that raises the level.

Closing notes

While a GPX track is now standard procedure, it’s always a good idea to carry a good paper map, such as the Tabacco 016 for this hike. The GPX is valuable, but nothing beats the map when it comes to details, precision, and reliability. I ran out of battery on my phone on day two. It was fully charged when I left the bivouac. Still, always-on Komoot tracking can be taxing on the battery on very long days. I had a power bank with me, but the point still stands. A paper map is durable and, as such, always available.

An emergency satellite navigation device is mandatory for solo adventures, let alone one like this. I had no cell signal for three consecutive days. Yet every evening, when I arrived at the bivouac, I could text Serena to let her know I was doing fine. Moreover, in the unfortunate event of an emergency, help is just a press of the SOS button away.

Do your homework. Prepare consciously and adapt your usual routine to the expected situation. Knowing there was little water on the route, I brought an extra one-and-a-half-litre bottle with me. Best call ever.

Wait for the best weather. I had been waiting for the perfect long weekend for one month. I only went when the forecast was highly optimistic. Knowing that the weather is not an issue is a significant relief and a crucial safety measure, especially on hazardous and challenging terrain.

I could go on a super sunny weekend because we were almost in the Fall. Going off-season is beneficial for many reasons, one of which is that it’s not scorching hot weather. Also, you can expect very little company on the route and, more importantly, at the bivouacs. The room in those shelters is minimal. Being alone in both of them was a luxury, but a planned one.

The GPX is I used is available here. This is not the effective recording because well, my phone died at some point, as mentioned.

What are the features of Fascism? We need to know, so we can recognize them and point them out as they emerge, as they always tend to do, time and time again, as our societies struggle to evolve.

Sounds like heavy reading material, but it isn’t. I mean, look at the incipit:

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

Brilliant. I forgot what a masterpiece of synthesis, clarity, accessibility, and subtle irony this essay is. While Schwartz’s post offers an excellent, concise synthesis, the original is worth reading in its entirety, especially in today’s context.

The Monte Mauro loop is a classic route in the Vena del Gesso area. Wooded areas alternate with exposed stretches below the summit of Monte Mauro, where you literally walk on chalk outcrops. The trail is well marked, but you have to pay attention to the path because there are often alternatives (also marked) that can confuse you. It is an enjoyable short tour.

I had no backpack or equipment, and I alternated between fast walking and running, especially in the final stretch, taking no rest. Therefore, the times reported (1h 56m) should be taken with a grain of salt.

I had already been to Monte Mauro about thirty years ago, and I remembered it as being much less wooded, which was probably the case. Track and details on Komoot.

PS: Cover images aren’t included in the RSS feed, so you won’t see this post’s picture if you are reading from the newsletter. If curious, click here.

Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents.1 The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system

Why Exercise is a Miracle Drug

It’s also because of this recent changes in our lives that I could appreciate the story of the three-day hiking trip that Dries Buytaert took with his son Axl in the French Alps. Axl has just finished high school and will soon be at University, so this hike served as a rite of passage for both of them. I profoundly understand Dries’s emotional moment:

As we sat down, we had time for deeper conversations. We talked about how life will change now that he is eighteen and about to leave for university. I told him our hike felt symbolic. The climb up was like the years behind us, when his parents, myself included, made most of the important decisions in his life. The way down would be different. From here he would choose his own path in life, and my role would be to walk beside him and support him. Saying it out loud caught me by surprise. It left me with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. It felt as if we would leave one version of Axl at the summit and return with another, stepping into adulthood and independence.

Sustaining our children from afar is demanding and draining in many ways, but it is also rewarding. We observe their struggles and accomplishments from a distance, sometimes worried and feeling powerless and unhelpful, yet with a sense of pride and achievement that is unparalleled.

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It’s not imagined, it’s there and we can feel it. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code.

Cognitive Load is what matters

I appreciate that the final output is the result of an open collaborative effort.

Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python’s future wasn’t certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

Python: The Documentary

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication

Notes on Managing ADHD

We had long used an internal API by our accounting software, which was also utilized by thousands of our end users. We decided to make our experience and expertise available to external developers, allowing them to integrate electronic invoicing into their applications quickly via a public API. Thus, the Invoicetronic project was born.

We had made a similar choice in the past with the open-source release of FatturaElettronica.NET, also a library initially created for internal use. Eve and Cerberus for Python started as an internal projects too.

We didn’t limit ourselves to just opening our API to the public. That alone would have been challenging (as any veteran well knows, opening a private product to a broader and more diverse audience is already a real challenge in itself). We seized the opportunity, years after its creation and with millions of invoices having passed through the system in the meantime, to refresh the design, improve performance, and add important features that proved stimulating to implement.

I certainly wasn’t lacking experience with REST APIs, but I still learned a lot, especially while working on the tools accessory to the actual API. An example is the client SDKs. We support all the most common programming languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, and Go. They’re built using OpenAPI Generator, a tool I initially underestimated but which turned out to be excellent, thanks also to the remarkable ecosystem built by the community. Working on the SDKs also provided me with the opportunity to improve my Continuous Integration skills. Beyond the usual test-containerization-staging-deploy cycle, every API update is followed by an automatic release of all SDKs, each with deployment on both GitHub and the reference package manager for the language: PyPI, NuGet, npm, etc. Seemingly obvious tasks (such as inferring the new API version number from CI and then reusing it in the package version of individual SDKs) required considerable brainstorming.

The Invoicetronic project, which gave me the most satisfaction and taught me the most, is invoice-cli. This open source command-line tool enables sending and receiving electronic invoices from the terminal, and is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. You don’t need to be a developer or study the API in depth to use it, and, not secondarily, it can be conveniently inserted into a script. A trivial usage example would be:

# send a single invoice.
$ invoice send file1.xml

# send multiple invoices, then delete the local copies.
$ invoice send *.xml --delete

# individually send multiple files.
$ invoice send file1.xml file2.xml file3.xml

# receive all unread invoices.
$ invoice receive --unread

From my point of view, though, the interesting thing about invoice is that it’s written in Go, a language I hadn’t yet had the chance to use professionally. A veteran would likely find fault with the implementation details and the chosen approach, but I hope they’ll be merciful, considering I’m a beginner in this space. We could have used C#, which is now our reference language. Still, in the case of the command-line, Go seemed like a better choice, first of all, for the exceptional support in creating native multi-platform binaries, then for performance both cold and hot, and for deployment simplicity. If I had to make another command-line tool, I would return to Go rather than orient myself toward languages I know better and with which I’m more comfortable, like Python and C# (speaking of C#, the recent improvements in AOT and cross-platform support are remarkable - we’re on the right track, come on guys!)

A second stimulating project was the Invoicetronic MCP Server. We were interested in having developers interact with the Invoicetronic API via LLM, and an MCP server serves precisely that purpose. Fortunately, C# has an excellent official library (still in preview but sufficiently mature) that simplifies the work, and implementing and deploying a first experimental version was relatively simple. There is enormous potential in this area, and I want to stay on top of it: objective achieved (I also gave a couple of presentations on the topic).

We released Invoicetronic for our own use, but I hope other developers will adopt it. Throughout many years of activity, our primary client has consistently been the end-user, the company that utilizes our accounting applications. In recent years, we also engaged with developers, but only in the context of our open-source projects. I’d love to serve them professionally as well.

Thank you, whoever you are, for the extraordinary work done on this website (via).

Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess up. A lot. You’ll give feedback that lands wrong and crushes someone’s confidence. You’ll make a decision that seems logical but turns out to be completely misguided. You’ll forget that important thing you promised to do for someone on your team. You’ll lose your temper in a meeting when you should have stayed calm. The real question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes; it’s what you do after.

The Management Skill Nobody Talks About

I’m turning 55 in a few days, and sometimes I wonder if I should slow down or reduce the intensity of my training. I’ve made adjustments along those lines in recent years, but I suspect I am still pretty active for my age.

Today I read Herman’s post on the ROI of exercise, and it is spot on. It’s common sense; we’ve all read those things, but here they are nicely compiled. The concept that lifelong exercise “adds extra years to each stage of life rather than just frail years at the end” hit home for me.

The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it’s 1995. Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto (and yeah, we’re not rich now). NFTs got a collective eye roll. But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while listening to dial-up modems sing are now vibe-coding with the kids. Building things. Breaking things. Giddy about it.

We Gen X’ers have seen enough gold rushes to know the real thing. This one’s got all the usual crap—bad actors, inflated claims, VCs throwing money at anything with “AI” in the pitch deck. Gross behavior all around. Normal for a paradigm shift, but still gross.

The people who helped wire up the internet recognize what’s happening. When the folks who’ve been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something.

– Christina Wodtke (via)

I was hiking the Narrows trail along the Rockcastle river in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, slipped off the edge of the trail and broke me ankle. There was no cell phone service so I ended up butt-crawling a ways on the trail (crutches I hacked together made things worse with weak wood out there) until I finally raised a faint signal. Texted 911 (so thankful they have this service for the deaf), helped their volunteer rescue squad locate me by boat on the river below and their wonderful firemen hauled me down the mountain with good cheer.

Lucky man. Reaching an area with cell phone reception was not impossible, and the distance to cover was still feasible.

Reading stories like this doesn’t make me as nervous as it did before I took the plunge and got a Garmin InReach Mini and then joined CAI, so I would have insurance coverage for emergency rescues.

The lies we tell others are for survival.
But the lies we tell ourselves…
those can kill us!

A quote from Ragazzo by Zuzu, which I read recently.

Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, confronts an uncomfortable truth: professional decline begins much earlier than most people expect.

The core of Brooks’ argument is based on psychologist Raymond Cattell’s work from the 1940s, which distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence—analytical capacity, processing speed, and the ability to solve novel problems—peaks in one’s early thirties and then declines precipitously, which explains why many tech entrepreneurs achieve fame and fortune in their twenties but enter creative decline by age 30.

Crystallized intelligence, conversely, represents the ability to use knowledge accumulated over time—the essence of wisdom. This form of intelligence tends to increase through one’s forties and doesn’t diminish until very late in life. Careers that depend primarily on fluid intelligence tend to reach their peak early, while those utilizing more crystallized intelligence tend to reach their peak later.

Brooks suggests that as we age, we should embrace this change and prepare in advance for a transition, planning to move from innovator to mentoring and teaching roles.

Another study that struck me is the 2007 study by UCLA and Princeton researchers, also mentioned in the article, that showed that elderly people who rarely or never felt “useful” were nearly three times more likely to develop depression than those who frequently felt useful. It may seem like common sense, and it probably is, but we should keep this in mind when interacting with our elderly loved ones.

I’m turning 55 this year. I’m still grinding like there’s no tomorrow, though. I am in a peculiar position, as running my own company and being responsible for the people working with me makes transitioning to something else a less-than-easy option. Additionally, in my field, continuous learning is essential, as failure to do so can render one obsolete in short order; therefore, I am committed to and used to ongoing training. I’m not slowing down, at least not yet. Experience makes decision-making easier (and wiser?), and learning still comes naturally, perhaps because of the knowledge base I can draw upon.

That’s how I feel today as I ponder Brooks’ article, but I’ll admit that the thought of slowing down surfaces sometimes. Also, I’m often the only grey-bearded individual in the crowd (especially noticeable at conferences where I’m speaking), and that must mean something.

He has always been an entertaining speaker and teacher. As it turns out, the TED format suits him perfectly.

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today.

The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it.

Just One Good Thing

Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future.

Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025

Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand distributed systems, you’ll use AI to build better ones. If you don’t, you’ll use AI to create distributed disasters.

The difference? When that AI-generated code breaks in production — and it will — you need to know why. When it doesn’t scale — and it won’t — you need to understand the bottlenecks. When it creates race conditions, memory leaks, or architectural nightmares, GitHub Copilot won’t save you. Your fundamentals will.

What Doesn’t Change

I believe what’s important isn’t the specific technology itself, but rather maintaining curiosity that always looks toward new alternatives and making technical decisions based on your own judgment rather than simply delegating your choices to popular opinion.

In Praise of the Contrarian Stack

I have many thoughts right now, and it will take some time for them to settle. A good analysis and explanation of why this move is needed and is a good first step can be found in yesterday’s article by Dries Buytaert’s, The Web’s Broken Deal with AI Companies, which I recommend everyone read.

For 25 years, we built the Open Web on an implicit agreement: search engines could index our content because they sent users back to our websites. That model helped sustain blogs, news sites, and even open source projects. AI companies broke that model. They train on our work and answer questions directly in their own interfaces, cutting creators out entirely. Anthropic’s crawler reportedly makes 70,000 website requests for every single visitor it sends back. That is extraction, not exchange.

The ongoing discussion on Hacker News is also worth reading

Side note, I am fascinated by the technical details surrounding the 402 Payment Required response (and Cloudflare’s implementation), which was designed explicitly for micro-payment handling but never gained traction, until now.

A calm day is always welcome, but there’s a perverse pleasure in struggling against violent gusts, or enjoying the steady rhythmic crackle of rain on a waterproof hood. Sometimes, bad weather can feel like a gift, exactly what’s needed to stir the senses and awaken the brain.

I also share with him my disillusionment about the sublime purity of nature.

When I was young I saw only what I wanted to see — mostly myself — in what appeared to be a beautiful landscape with the occasional thrill of the sublime. But now, I see every sign of intensive land management; little is natural or truly wild when almost every hectare is the product of either sheep farming, grouse production, or forestry. And I think about issues of ownership, class, exclusion, climate and tourism. This landscape is political, and it reflects all of us.

choosing software used to be straightforward. does the app do what you need, or not? but now, opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.

I don’t necessarily agree with the premise. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we chose which BBS to operate as Sysops not only based on features but also culture, style, and aesthetics. Given the option, humans make a choice based on both function and form. Why behave differently with software?

The notion versus obsidian face-off is brilliant. As a Team Obsidian, I find Omer’s take amusing and spot on:

if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out.

Style is more relevant these days, that’s for sure, but that’s also a consequence of proliferation. There are so many viable alternatives today that products also need to differentiate on form.

these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste. they’re selling time. and people buy in, not just because the tools are better (some of them aren’t), but because they feel like tools made for people who care.

You are what you launch is a good read.

I’m very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to work on databases and solve unique challenges with such a talented team would be a dream job, but it is that much more special to me because of my unusual and unlikely circumstances. As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison. If you don’t know me, let me tell you more about how I got here.

What a remarkable story of redemption and an example of how far hard work, determination, and discipline can take you.

Update (2026-06-24): Mandar Vaze reports the Preston Thorpe was recently interviewed on the Changelog podcast.

Acoustic Hits has undeservedly remained under the radar, or at least it has for me. I only recently discovered it thanks to YouTube¹², where many of its beautiful sessions are available and of excellent quality.

True to form, I bought the album, and for the past few days, as I ride out this fourth goddam iteration of COVID, it’s been on heavy rotation.

Having left Twitter a while ago and Facebook a long time before that, I’m left with Mastodon precisely because there are fewer people there, and they are more in my niche; it feels like the pre-mass social media world, like the first Twitter years. Not coincidentally, I’m also receiving more feedback on my content than anywhere else.

I doubt I’ll get back into social networks; they failed me hard. I get all my news from RSS anyway, where I can select the sources, and there’s no algorithm dictating the agenda.

But, there’s a bit, and that’s that I’m not programming anymore, or very little now, and I love coding. I love entering “the zone” and solving complex problems, one at a time. It’s always been my superpower. Will I still have fun in the future now that I can delegate most tasks to Claude Code?

In his The Hidden Cost of AI Coding, Matheus Lima expresses the same concern:

Instead of that deep immersion where I’d craft each function, I’m now more like a curator? I describe what I want, evaluate what the AI gives me, tweak the prompts, and iterate. It’s efficient, yes. Revolutionary, even. But something essential feels missing — that state of flow where time vanishes and you’re completely absorbed in creation. If this becomes the dominant workflow across teams, do we risk an industry full of highly productive yet strangely detached developers?

I’m afraid there’s no going back; agentic coding is so helpful that it’s tough to let go, especially in tiny teams like mine. Matheus suggests we preserve some space in our work where the flow can still happen, and that’s probably what I’m going to do: on some projects, maybe the open-source ones I maintain, resist the temptation of a claude /init and keep going like the good old times. One can at least try.

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (via)

A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. […] The principle is: If a note can be public, it should be.

Unconsciously, I am trying to do the same, as you might have noticed by the increased activity on this website. Maintaining consistency can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort.

Today I learned about a nice NPM package called MCP Remote, which bridges the gap by allowing MCP clients that only support local servers to connect to remote MCP Servers, even with authentication support. Thanks to this tool, Claude Desktop is now talking to my remote server¹.

The only problem is that the OAuth2 handshake is not initiated at Claude startup or the first 401 response, as I expected, so I had to fall back to my secondary authentication method, the custom header.

I could, of course, retrieve my OAuth2 token out of band and then pass it to MCP Remote, but that’s cumbersome and boring. For now, I’m satisfied with the custom header approach. It’s only a matter of time before Claude Desktop matures enough to fully support Remote MCP servers. Right?

For my latest presentation, I utilized the Slides Extended Obsidian plugin, which is based on reveal.js—an excellent option for keeping slide decks within one’s Obsidian vault (I keep all notes, work and personal journals, and knowledge in Obsidian.)

Marp could be a viable alternative to the plugin, as Obsidian notes are just markdown files. The advantage here is that I can further elaborate or iterate on my slides, for example, from the command line, as Marp comes with a dedicated CLI tool that lets you export to PDF, HTML, and more. Additionally, Marp is not based on reveal.js, a tool that has given me headaches in the past.

My understanding is that Marp is more geared toward producing “static” slides intended for PDF or other outputs (HTML included, though). In contrast, reveal-based solutions allow for more advanced features, such as animated slides, which I don’t like and use anyway.

After removing the BouncyCastle dependency (v3.4.16) for signature, content extraction, and encoding purposes, a few minor behavioral changes were introduced in the library.

1. It was previously possible to extract content from documents with tampered signatures (if signature validation was flagged false)
2. Signature exceptions were being misreported as Base64 FormatExceptions for non-base64 input files

After a lengthy analysis and troubleshooting, it was determined that System.Cryptography (which now replaces BouncyCastle) cannot support the successful decoding of tampered invoices. However, this is undesirable as a feature in the first place. The result is a breaking change: attempting to read tampered documents will now invariably throw SignatureException.

Many thanks to Paolo Manili, aka Delta-38, for contributing this remarkable update.

Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing, whatever that might be once the AI hype dies off in a year or two. But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it’s not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn’t commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich.

Chatting with my friends about how I hate these fascist assholes doesn’t do a damn thing. Protests work. (Imperfectly, sure, with no guarantees. But it sure beats not protesting.)

He’s attending No Kings today.

As a broke teenager, the web was this strange wonderland where you could access all kinds of copyrighted material using tools developed by fringe individuals/communities: Napster, Kazaa, Torrents, Usenet, etc. These tools (at least in the beginning) weren’t really made for profit, just to subvert the gatekeepers (and yeah, steal their profits).

Now — in a strange twist of irony — things seem to have flipped:

• 1999: Individuals use digital tools to steal intellectual property from corporations.
• 2025: Corporations use digital tools to steal intellectual property from individuals.

The empire strikes back.

We were born with our heads facing forward and our eyes looking backward toward the future and the past. We have always struggled more with the present.

A review that makes them justice and includes a concise yet well-done listening guide is on Far Out.

I’m excited to see them live in September.

On the topic of Agenting Coding he recently published:

• AI Changes Everything (you should read it)
• GenAI Criticism and Moral Quandaries

Both already reported.

I had intended to record the audio with the idea of transcribing it with MacWhisper and then publishing it here on my site, but I forgot to do so, which is a pity.

The session lasted almost two hours (I had thought it would take less time), during which I deviated somewhat from the script, using slides as a guide that were essentially an adaptation of the notes I had taken during my experiments. I showed the code for the MCP servers I created (stdio and streamable HTTP transports), demonstrated the various ways to link them with LLMs (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and VS Code), and then shared my thoughts on the entire matter.

I received quite a bit of feedback, both in the room and afterward, when we moved to a pub where we stayed quite late by my standards, discussing AI, LLMs, and their impact on our daily work, which we can certainly define as significant, if not massive. Everyone uses LLMs’ UIs at their job to some extent, but very few are currently into agentic coding (the idea of a future session on that topic is tempting).

One remarkable tool that surfaced during the pub chat is Kotaemon, “an open-source RAG-based tool for chatting with your documents.”.

In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else.

– Sam Altman

Hey, why did you build a CLI tool instead of an IDE?

Yeah, it’s a good question. There are two reasons. We started this at Anthropic, where people use a broad range of IDEs. Some people use VS code. Other people use Zed, Xcode, Vim, or Emacs. And it was just hard to build something that works for everyone. And so the terminal is just the common denominator. The second thing is that at Anthropic, we see firsthand how quickly the model is improving. I think there’s a good chance that by the end of the year, people won’t use IDEs. And so, we want to prepare for this future and avoid over-investing in UI and other layers on top. Given the way the models are progressing, it may not be practical to work on them soon.

Well, that’s one fascinating bold statement right there. It aligns with a vision I’ve had for a while: in a not-too-distant future, people will use LLM UIs (think Claude.ai with plug-and-play MCP support and voice recognition¹ both built in) as their primary interface instead of many different, specialized applications, at least for most use cases.

We live in a metrics obsessed culture that is obsessed with narrowly defined productivity. There’s too much focus on accountability and too little focus on creativity. The reason why we don’t have Bell Labs is because we’re unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy. The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

This sentence, in particular, rings true in an aching way:

Judging people inside the fat trap just intensifies their misery and reduces the odds they can get out of it.

The initialization of Claude on the repository surprised me; the analysis (reported in CLAUDE.md) is thorough and reveals a good understanding of the project, including both the code and the general functioning, strategies, techniques, technologies and libraries employed.

I asked Claude to generate a test suite from scratch, and it did so rather effortlessly (it went back and forth a few times, and it is fascinating following its reasoning and attempts from a distance). Claude added the tests to the existing project, a big no-no for me. I asked it to go back and create a dedicated test project, and it complied, adding the new project to the solution. It took several iterations to achieve a good result. We now have 134 tests that cover 98% of the project’s business logic. Upon request, Claude also added code coverage by installing the missing tools.

Once satisfied with the test suite and having committed and pushed (via Claude) the work done, I asked Claude to set up a GitHub Action to run the tests on every push, then to update the existing workflows (container build; deployment to test or production; etc.) so they all run tests first.

In half a day of work, during which I mostly did other things, such as helping a colleague while Claude was chugging away, I achieved what would have taken me a week or even just a few days.

I have very little to complain about in terms of code quality, and where I wasn’t satisfied, I informed Claude and the unsatisfying code was quickly and pleasantly refactored. However, some refactoring is better done with Rider because it’s faster, doesn’t miss anything (like Claude tends to do if there are multiple similar refactorings to be done and they are scattered across various files) and doesn’t waste tokens that count toward usage limits (with the Pro subscription, we have access to a lighter tier of Claude Code. You want the Max subscription for unlimited - or higher anyway- ceiling).

One valuable feature is memory. You can have Claude memorize directives. This memory can be local to the repo or global. I instructed Claude to prefer collection expressions and utilize C#’s new targeted-type initialization feature, among other things, which were duly noted. I then asked Claude to refactor in light of the new directives, and it did. New code is now produced according to my preferences, and it will be on all my projects.

A thorough code review is always necessary, of course, but wouldn’t you do that for any code coming into your project?

Color me impressed so far. Copying and pasting from LLM’s web UIs is already a thing of the past. The present is all about agents, and they’re just getting started.

Knowing when to leave might be more important than knowing when to show up.

– kupajo in When to Leave

It wasn’t the purpose of his article, but I wish Armin had gone into the details of how, why, and when he delegates tasks to Claude Code.

Update: Armin later a follow-up.

It’s a move I’ve been contemplating for some time. Like Simone, I use Linux at work daily so that the task wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, but I’m probably too lazy (or too old) to execute it.

The Serra Pass mule track is one of the most fascinating in the entire Casentino territory, if only for the tangible memory of the millions of feet that have trodden, traveled, and worn it down over the centuries. It connected – and still connects – the upper Savio valley with that of Corsalone, branching off from the Romagna valley floor near the Gualchiere (about 2 km south of Bagno di Romagna) and climbing up the Nasseto ridge to reach the summit ridge at a pass that isn’t exactly low (1,150 m), but evidently “convenient” for other reasons, given that its use is documented as early as prehistoric times and experienced an intense period with medieval pilgrimages directed to Rome and later to La Verna.

This itinerary follows its best-preserved section, on the Tuscan side, from the mountain hamlet of Serra to the pass of the same name, among remnants of ancient stone paving where one seems to still perceive that “incessant wearing of steps” of pilgrims who descended from the Alps to reach the hospitals of Serra and Scapruggine, now safe from the dangers and storms of the ridge.

This trip was also an opportunity to take a ride on my motorcycle. The combination of motorcycling and hiking is not easy to pull off, especially with a classic bike like mine, but it’s worth it as it combines two of my passions.

GPX track available here.

GPX track and details available here.

The day was bright and perfect, and everything went well. The highlight of the day was testing the Garmin InReach, and La Lama is the ideal place to test such an item since you have no cell signal. I sent and received text messages via satellite with Serena. The messages are geo-localized. You are no longer isolated; it works anywhere worldwide, and you can issue an SOS call anytime. Garmin will contact Mountain Rescue or equivalent service anywhere. As I have recently re-enrolled in CAI, social insurance should also cover any extraction intervention. I am very pleased with this setup; safety has increased dramatically. I have gone and come back on my motorcycle.

The Fattura Elettronica open-source project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by the Italian Revenue Agency.

But the kicker was just before the session when, at the coffee break, an attendant approached me to shake hands and tell me he had known me for a long time because he discovered and used Eve in a research project he was working on years ago. As I recall, he had attended one of my Eve sessions at EuroPython, maybe in Berlin in 2014. As is often the case, he had no immediate need for my project and shelved it as “interesting, and cool that it’s by an Italian author, but I don’t need really it”. Then, a couple of years later, in a time of need, he recalled that little presentation of mine, and, long story short, Eve ended up being adopted by a big, unnamed corp or research institute. I thanked him from the bottom of my heart and told him it was worth preparing for the talk, waking up at 4 am and travelling to Rome to meet him and hear his story. It’s moments like this that make it all worth it. Also, hearing such a Python story at a .NET event was unexpected.

Nothing gratifies me more than seeing my open-source work appreciated and actively used in the wild.

Special thanks to Fabio Spaziani and the whole DotNetCode team for accomodating for my “daily commuter from afar” special needs.

Hobbits were no part of Tolkien’s original plan. They entered rather late and through a side door, as the unexpected central characters in a children’s story, The Hobbit which Tolkien invented for his own children but which found an immediate and lasting worldwide audience. And of which The Lord of the Rings was the commissioned, longed-awaited and trebly successful sequel.

The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy is a good short read (via)

Two things strike me about this story.

The video is worth watching. Not so much for the content itself but for the delivery. No emphasis, special effects, marketing crap, visual tricks, or star tricks whatsoever. The strength is in the message; any addition would be a distraction. I was fortunate enough to attend a few meetings with Hejlsberg at the Microsoft Campus in Redwood, and, well, emphasis and hyperbole are certainly not his style. He’s genuinely a down-to-heart type of guy. On the other hand, he is Danish, not American.

For purely business reasons, Microsoft could have forced the choice of one of its languages for the rewrite. Of course, none of those would have been ideal, least of all C# (itself a Hejlsberg creature), but corporate reasons could easily have prevailed. Hejlsberg and his team could pick the best tool for the job. Go is the lowest-level language with a GC; it compiles natively on all platforms, has great parallelism support, and you can write excellent functional code with it. It says a lot about Microsoft, the cultural shift it has managed since the late 1990s and early 2000s, and how it stays relevant today, unlike many of its competitors of those times.

I am concerned that by switching to Go, they will no longer dogfood the language. By their admission, maintaining that massive compiler codebase in TypeScript was instrumental in adequately developing the language. We’ll see how that pans out now that they’re not working TypeScript daily.

I’ll end by quoting a YouTube commenter who nailed it in one sentence:

Imagine creating several languages but still choosing a different one for your compiler rewrite because it’s just the best tool for the job - absolute ego-less GOAT move.

When it rains heavily, streets fill with earthworms for several reasons:

1. Earthworms breathe through their skin, which must remain moist. During heavy rainfall, their underground tunnels flood, forcing them to surface to avoid drowning.

2. The vibrations of raindrops on the soil can be mistaken by earthworms for those produced by predators like moles, causing them to flee to the surface.

3. Rainy periods are ideal for earthworms to move and find new habitats or mates, as they can travel on the moist surface without risking dehydration.

4. On paved surfaces like roads and sidewalks, water tends to accumulate more than in soil, creating conditions that attract earthworms.

Unfortunately, once earthworms reach the asphalt, they often become trapped and unable to return to the soil, becoming easy prey or risking dehydration when the sun returns.

One of the most essential practices for maintaining the long-term quality of computer code is to write automated tests that ensure the program continues to act as expected, even when other people (including your future self) muck with it.

– Evan Miller (via)

Don’t worry about criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.

That’s profound for a boy who’s just 23 years of age.

• FatturaElettronica for .NET 3.6 has been released. It adds support for the upcoming technical specifications v1.9 that are coming into effect on April 1, 2025 (not a joke.) The changelog is here.
• I did some maintenance work on Eve. The CI workflow has been switched to ubuntu-latest from 20.04, as the latter is about to be sunsetted by GitHub. I also merged two pull requests (#1541 and #1547), one of which was long-standing. There isn’t enough material for a release, although the guys who submitted the PRs might think otherwise (if that’s the case, let me know.)
• I ran two DevRomagna meetups. The first one was on OpenTelemetry and was kept by Alessandro Mengoli, of whom I’m very proud (I’ve been encouraging him to start speaking for a long time.) The second was on Linux Containers but before Docker. The speaker was Gabriele Santomaggio, my go-to buddy regarding low-level networking stuff. I found both events to be quite successful and enjoyable. I hope the other attendants agree.
• I finally deactivated my Twitter/X account. I abandoned the platform a while ago and did not miss it. I maintain a presence on Mastodon and Bluesky, mainly to propagate whatever content I post on my website, but don’t count on me following or reading you there (same with LinkedIn.) I’m not active on social media and don’t see myself getting back into them. I’m not interested anymore (and the content there is mostly trash.)
• I went on a nice hike a couple of weeks ago. It was cold and overcast, and that’s why, I suspect, I did not meet a single person the whole day.
• Speaking of hiking, I finally got myself a Garmin inReach Mini 2 device. It’s meant to be used in case of emergency. It allows me to call for help and send sms messages even when no cell signal is available (it uses the Iridium satellite network.) I resisted getting it so far because of the high cost, not so much of the device itself, but the mandatory subscription. Only recently, I found that one can buy Garmin data plans from other vendors, and ProteGear has a nice option to suspend the subscription when not in use. So, I bought the device from Garmin, activated it, and subscribed to ProteGear. It’s looking good so far, and sending sms messages (and emails!) when there’s no cell signal feels like black magic.
• I’ve been reading good books, and I’m grateful for them.
• Well, my dad is not doing well. He’s okay now, but he’s been going through a lot, and more is expected soon. That’s life, I know.
• I am having difficulty making peace with what is happening in the world right now. American friends, I cannot understand how you could re-elect Donald Trump for a second term. It beats me. I am in shock and worried about the geopolitical consequences. I hope time will prove me wrong, but the future looks grim.

1. 5180 git
2. 777 cd
3. 653 ls
4. 452 go
5. 440 ./invoice
6. 377 dotnet
7. 373 rm
8. 270 vi
9. 225 cat
10. 219 ssh

Version control dominates the scene (a gentle middle finger for the youngster - you know who you are - who told me I should not be coding anymore). I also like that the list hints at the new stuff I’ve been working on recently and am excited about.

Generated with history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq --count | sort --numeric-sort --reverse | head -10 and inspired by Chris De Luca.

The usual scoring system applies:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars mean a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars mean a book is good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars mean a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

The question of Palestine, by E.W. Said

(La Questione Palestinese, il Saggiatore)

★★★☆☆

I was interested in learning about Israeli-Palestinian history from the beginning, and I wanted it told from the perspective of an Arab-Palestinian scholar and critic. In the West, we grow with Western and pro-Israeli narratives, and it is super-hard to get access to the Palestinian narration. The Palestinian Question turned out to be the ideal text. “The tragedy of being a victim of victims.”

The garden of the Finzi-Contini, by Giorgio Bassani

(Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, audiolibro)

★★★★☆

The Garden of the Finzi-Contini is probably the most understated and effective novel about the Holocaust. It is also a bittersweet and nostalgic tale of youth. The reconstruction of provincial life in the years immediately preceding World War II is touching, especially if one is fortunate enough to know Ferrara and its historic town center. The prose is rich, the characters are all indispensable and well-chiseled, each peculiar in his way, but some stand out, like Micol. The dialogues, never trite, often hint at unspoken yet implied meanings. Near the novel’s end, the late-night conversation between the protagonist (whose name we never know) and his old father touched me deeply. This slow burner picks up pace as it approaches its inevitable, bitter end.

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

(Pensieri, Oscar Mondadori)

★★★★☆

Marcus Aurelius, one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, kept a journal to collect his thoughts about how to live well. It was not meant for the public, and in fact, it did not go public until centuries after the emperor’s death, when it surfaced in its original Greek form, probably with missing and corrupted parts. Meditations is that journal, a work of motivational advice that inspires us in stoicism and a manual for being a complete, mature adult living a dignified, thoughtful life. Some concepts repeatedly resurface throughout the twelve books that make the text:

• inevitability of death
• irrelevance of the individual no matter their importance in life
• how to be a good man
• forgive the defects of others
• accept and embrace what comes at us, be it good or bad
• live in accordance wit nature

These and others were reflections and aims meant for the author, not lectures for an audience. That these thoughts came from the most powerful man in the world makes it all the more impressive. Two thousand years have passed, and humanity still struggles with the same essential topics and unanswered questions.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

(Lolita, audiolibro)

★★★★★

I read many of Nabokov’s works but avoided reading Lolita for a long time despite its universal acclaim as his masterpiece. I was not ready to confront its obscenity. In hindsight, I cowardly feared that my admiration for the writer would be affected. However, now that I have read the book, I know it is both shocking and disturbing, yet sublime. While reading, I couldn’t help but appreciate the author’s audacity in publishing a text like this in 1955. It was then pointed out to me that it was easier to publish works on the topic of pedophilia during that time as compared to today¹.

Quoting Nabokov in his afterword to the Italian edition (Adelphi):

Lolita does not carry any morals with it. For me, a work of fiction exists only if it provides me with what I will frankly call aesthetic voluptuousness, that is, the sense of being in touch, somehow, somewhere, with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, goodness, ecstasy) is the norm. The others are topical garbage or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often consists of circumstantial shenanigans that are lovingly passed on from era to era in large chalk blocks until someone gives Balzac, Gorky, Mann a good hammering.

I am glad to report that my admiration for the author is intact. Shoutout to Ennio Fantastichini for his exceptional audiobook reading (Ad Alta Voce, Radio Tre.)

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

(Lessico Famigliare, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

The key to this novel is outlined already in its title. It is familiar because it tells the story of a Jewish and antifascist family, the Levi family, in Turin between the 1930s and 1950s. And Lexicon because the paths of memory pass through the recollection of phrases, idioms, and slang expressions that only existed within the family. The Levi’s were not just an ordinary family. During those years, characters who were already or would become influential for the time passed by their house: politicians, industrialists, and intellectuals are all told from the point of view of a kid (later a girl, then a woman) who observes them from an unusual and unprejudiced angle. The years of Jewish persecution, confinement, and the postwar period are recounted without drama; the Great Story is lived daily and flows around them; they’re impacted in significant ways, yet the focus stays on the family, its members and the many characters that revolve around it. The outstanding characters are the mother and the father; Natalia, the author, stays on the fringe, rarely seen or mentioned, if not by the last part of the book.

Under the Volcano, by Malcom Lowry

(Sotto il Vulcano, Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

I gave up on this one. I wanted to like this one. I attempted it a couple of times last year, and then I tried with an audiobook, which was more engaging. However, in the end, I abandoned it again. Again, I’m sorry because the writing is good, and the author is remarkable in their art. Nothing happens throughout the 400+ pages of this book. The plot could be summarized as primarily drunk people wandering around a small Mexican town at the foot of two volcanoes, spending much of their time brooding over an old love triangle that was never entirely forgotten.

Women’s Resistance, by Benedetta Tobagi

(La Resistenza delle Donne, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

This book is exciting and well-written. It tells the story of the Italian Resistance from the point of view of women who participated actively in it and with an often decisive role but never really saw their merits appreciated, much less their participation recognized. The Italian Resistance was a pivotal and dramatic period of World War II, and women who chose to participate had to show even more courage and attitude than their male comrades, as in those times, women were expected to serve as mothers, wives, and housekeepers at home. War was a male affair; women leaving for the mountains to join packs of male rebels tended to be ill-reputed, and when captured, they risked far more than their male counterparts. At times, it tends a bit toward rhetoric, which is entirely excusable in this case, but even when it happens, the author quickly picks up the thread.

The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, by Marie Favereau

(L’Orda. Come i mongoli cambiarono il mondo, Einaudi)

★★★★☆

This book interested me because it offered a historically researched and accurate narrative of a historical period and geographical area I know little about: the Euro-Asiatic region between the 8th and 16th centuries, during the Mongol rule. It is a remarkable work that substantially revises and corrects the canonical image of the Mongols as ruthless and almost uncivilized rulers and conquerors. On the contrary, historical sources prove that the Mongol empire was based on flexibility, tolerance for customs, traditions and religions, integration and not assimilation, often allowing the dominant structures of the conquered territories to remain intact. The Empire offered ample and rich trade opportunities, both to the dominated and outsiders (the European, Muslim, and nonassimilated Asian powers), and thrived on the tribute it reaped from the thriving economy that resulted. The other key point of this book is the intrinsic and never-lost pure nomadic nature of the Empire, perhaps its distinguishing characteristic: Mongol leaders always remained nomadic, even as they conquered and assimilated settled civilizations, such as Russia, China, and Islamic regions of southern Asia. And yet the Empire shattered when, over time, it slowly moved away from ancestral, communal nomadic traditions in favor of an authoritarianism that, paradoxically, made the Empire less authoritative and, as such, weaker. I also learned about the origins of Russian society, the relevance of Kyiv and other principalities before the slow rise of Moscow, and the influence the Mongol Empire had in the formation of modern Russia.

Replay, by Jordan Mechner

★★★★☆

First Second Books/Macmillan, signed copy

A graphic memoir by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, recounting his own family story of war, exile and new beginnings.

It’s the first comic book I’ve read in a long while, and I’m glad I did. I pre-ordered a signed first edition from the USA that I received by post. The book is a work of craftsmanship. The story was a challenge for the author, I’m sure. Many characters from three (if not four) generations are juxtaposed and interwoven continuously; the risk of getting lost is real, but Mechner manages to keep control, also thanks to the comic form that he masters and lends itself to the purpose, for example, through the use of different color palettes depending on the era being narrated. Remarkably, this narrative would not have been possible without the diaristic fever that gripped at least three generations of this Jewish family that was uprooted and then dispersed across two continents by the dramatic events that followed the advent of Nazism in Europe.

Sixty Degrees North, by Malachy Tallack

★★★☆☆

Iperborea, I Corvi

Sixty Degrees North is a travel book written in the 2000s based on the author’s visits to each of the eight nations along this northern parallel. I didn’t expect that so much of it would be about the impact on the author of his father’s death when he was a teenager, his search to resolve his feelings about this, and his search to find somewhere to live that felt like home. These unexpected parts gravitate the book more toward the memoir genre, but the travel parts are still prevalent, well-researched, and recounted, some more interesting than others. This book touches on many things, often only superficially, which is a pity.

Kind of Blue, the making of the Miles Davis masterpiece, Ashley Kahn

★★★☆☆

Il Saggiatore

I saw the light the first time I listened to Kind of Blue, and I did a lot of research to find a text that would go into detail and explain how this legendary album came about and why it influenced jazz so much that it became the benchmark. Kind of Blue by Ashley Kahn fully met my expectations. Well-researched and written, full of first-hand accounts and quotes from the sextet members. I appreciated the introductory part that clearly illustrates where the jazz scene was at when the six came together to record this masterpiece, as well as the final part in which we understand the influence that Kind of Blue had, and is still having, in the decades that followed, not only in jazz but in all genres of music.

My Ingeborg, by Tore Renberg

★★★★☆

(La mia Ingeborg, Fazi)

Awarded best book of the year by Norwegian booksellers, this one is a literary bestseller dragged along by lashing writing, as taut as a thriller and as moving as a love story, My Ingeborg is an intense tale of a family that, headed by a destructive man, falls apart. A great book.

I love Russia, by Elena Kostyuchenko

★★★☆☆

(La mia Russia, Einaudi)

This book is written by an independent Russian journalist who worked at Novaja Gazeta for many years until it was banned. Mostly, these are reportages from the great rural Russia, far from the big cities (the story from small villages on the high-speed train line between Moscow and St. Petersburg is one of the best). I Love Russia helps us understand today’s deep Russia and the consequences of the fall of the USSR and the advent of Putin. It is also a love letter to the homeland, hence the title, but it does not bend to the official narrative; quite the opposite.

Blame! Vol. 1, by Tsutomu Nihei

★★★★☆

I came to this manga after watching the action movie on Netflix. The movie intrigued me, and I wanted to trace the source. It was well worth the effort. Cyberpunk is at its best here.

Taccuino 1870-1884, by Giuseppe De Nittis

★★★☆☆

We happened upon the De Nittis exhibition at the Royal Palace in Milan. It was a revelation, the best exhibition since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood one in Forlì a few months ago. Giuseppe De Nittis’s notebook, an inconspicuous booklet displayed in a few copies in the bookshop at the end of the exhibition, caught my eye. I bought it because I wanted to learn more about this artist from southern Italy who emigrated to Paris to become one of the most famous painters of his era. It turned out to be a good purchase. De Nittis recounts salient episodes of his life in the French period and in London (where “I made my fortune”), with several enjoyable episodes occurring during his travels in Italy, especially in Naples and his hometown Barletta in Apulia. We learn a lot about the artist’s life, peculiar personality, and the upper-class lifestyle of the time. In contrast, Italian episodes often depict scenes of popular life that would come across as stereotypical today but are undoubtedly genuine.

Trappole alimentari, by Stefano Vendrame

★★★☆☆

There are four things that never cease to amaze me: first, how disastrous people’s diets are; second, how little they realize; third, how even small changes in eating habits can make huge differences in health status; and fourth, how little people are willing to make such changes.

Vendrami is a nutritional biologist with great expertise and undoubted popularization skills (he’s also active on YouTube). In this book, he does not propose diets but highlights the “food traps” into which all of us in the West have fallen, induced mainly by the food industry. At the end of each chapter, Vendrami suggests behaviours and tricks that promise to get us back on track. Anchored in sound science, Food Traps is a valuable book worth keeping on hand, applying its suggestions a little at a time, without haste, with the long-term goal improving our nutrition strategy and, with it, achieve better health.

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

★★★☆☆

The first book in CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage series starring a team of MI5 agents united by one common bond: They’ve screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This was a fun read. I should read more fiction in the future, especially light-hearted fiction like this; it entertains and engages.

Pao Pao, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

★★★☆☆

This book is a collection of autobiographical accounts from the author’s military service in 1980. In Italy, military service was mandatory—a rite of passage for generations of young adults. I went through that ten years later (1990), but the experiences were very similar. His conscript life was much more transgressive and unruly than mine, and the book perhaps indulges too much in those excesses, but PVT was like that. Pao Pao is a worthwhile read, especially for remembering a long-gone, intensely lived era that will never return. Also, PVT was a great writer.

Storia di mia vita, Janek Gorczyca

★★☆☆☆☆

This book tells the the story of Janek, a Pole who has lived in Rome for over 30 years without a home, documents or a steady job. It is a work written in an overwhelming, cruel, and unique Italian language, as spoken by the protagonist. It is a short, rough and not wholly satisfying book.

The bastard brigade, Sam Kean

★★★★☆

(La brigata dei bastardi, Adelphi)

The Bastard Brigate tells the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses - dubbed the Alsos Mission - and sent them reeling into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany’s feared Uranium Club. This book is well conceived and executed, and I liked that there’s humour in it on almost every page, despite the dramatic events it narrates. I want to read more by Sam Kean.

Lacci, Domenico Starnone

★★★★☆

What are we willing to sacrifice so as not to feel trapped? And what do we lose when we choose to retrace our steps? Nothing is more radical than abandonment, but nothing is more tenacious than those invisible ties that bind people to one another. And sometimes, all it takes is the slightest gesture to resurface what we have tried to put aside. Domenico Starnone gives us a moving story, a masterful account of an escape, of a return, of all the failures that seem impossible to us and those that keep us company for a lifetime.

Walking, Erling Kagge

(Camminare, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

Walking, by Erling Kagge, is a book on walking. The author is an explorer who has walked to both poles and the summit of Everest; his performances are certainly out of the ordinary, yet in this book, he is more about the everyday act of walking: the walks he still takes every day, both in his neck of the woods (Norway) and around the many places in the world he has visited. The text contains thematic quotations from writers, philosophers, and other famous people, and it explores the meaning and utility, both physiological and psychological, of the act of walking. As a walker and hiker, I found myself in many of the arguments in the text, but Kagge explains and argues them better.

Blame! Vol. 2, by Tsutomu Nihei

★★★★☆

The second instalment of Blame didn’t delude me. I’m not very deep into mangas, so sometimes I’m in trouble parsing what I’m seeing and making sense of a story often told via drawings rather than words, but I welcome the challenge.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Damien Lewis ★★★☆☆

(Il ministero della guerra sporca)

Damien Lewis became an author largely by accident, when a British publisher asked him if he’d be willing to turn a TV documentary he was working on into a book (source).

Reading the book, one notices that the author must not have a literary background, as the language seems more appropriate for an action movie. It is not great literature, but it does tell a story worth knowing, that of the early clandestine actions that saw the baptism of the British SOE and Anders Lassen (SOE, SAS, SBS), a role model for all brave and swaggering agents operating behind the lines. In celebrating the daring actions of these outlawed warriors, this book does not hide their flaws, such as the abundant use of drugs to sustain themselves in action. I was surprised to learn that at the end of WWII, SOE operated in my area, and Lassen ultimately found his death in Comacchio (FE). His body is buried at the Argenta Gap War Cemetery, not too far from where I live.

The three-body problem, Cixin Liu ★★★★☆

(Il problema dei tre corpi, Mondadori)

It took me oh-so-long to get to this book. I was scared it would be a delusion, and I’m glad to say I was wrong. Excellent writing, an enthralling story, and lots of science intermixed with intriguing philosophical concepts and wild ideas—Sci-fi at his best.

White noise, Don DeLillo ★★★★☆

(Rumore Bianco, Einaudi)

I missed DeLillo, as it had been some years since I read him. White Noise is from 1985 but is still fresh and relevant today, maybe especially today. It’s the book that brought him to prominence and with merit. A couple random quotes:

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

DeLillo is The american postmodern writer. Well, along with Paul Auster, of course.

Class trip, Emmanuel Carrère ★★★☆☆

(La settimana bianca, Einaudi)

I thought this would be a chilly psychological murder mystery with a classic French Existentialism gloss. Instead, I read a haunting character study of a child filled with angst and dread, trying and failing to make sense of the disorienting world around him, never understanding the true nature of his existence in this meaningless, absurd, and often deadly world, which is French Existentialism in a nutshell. Class Trip is the only Carrere book I read that is pure fiction. He soon moved on to the fictionalised biography genre and became more effective there. Mine was a reread, as I found out today when I went to add the book to my library page and discovered I read it in 2016. It should tell either about the book’s impact on me, my ageing and sadly vanishing memory, or both. And yes, I own two copies of this book now; they’re different editions, at least.

The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster ★★★★☆

(Trilogia di New York, Einaudi)

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is a postmodern masterpiece. It is a collection of three short detective and mystery fiction novels initially published between 1985 and 1986: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Although seemingly independent stories, they share themes, atmospheres, and narrative structures that deeply connect them. All three novels explore the identity crisis of the protagonists, who are often driven to confuse themselves with other characters. The protagonists are isolated figures engulfed by an urban landscape (New York City) that becomes a veritable labyrinth. The city is more than a backdrop; it is a unifying and symbolic element. With its immensity and endless possibilities, New York represents a place of loss and finding but also an enigma. It functions as a reflection of the protagonists’ obsessions and quests. Auster plays with the boundaries between reality and fiction, questioning the meaning of writing and storytelling. In some cases, the narrator almost emerges as a character (so much so that one character is named “Paul Auster”.) The author litters the three novels with recurring elements that create a sense of continuity and mysterious interconnectedness. The objects, character names, and details that reappear suggest that the stories are not independent but parts of a single narrative universe. Again, a masterpiece. Also, the book that gave Auster fame.

Altri libertini, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli ★★★★☆

After Pao Pao, I wanted to go back to Pier Vittorio Tondelli, to his early work, to understand better what it was all about. I wanted to know more about the author, but also about what he was telling about, about that Italian generation of the late 70s and early 80s orphaned of the great ideals of the 60s, much more ramshackle, desperate and at the same time full of will to live. Great.

All your children, scattered, by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse ★★★★☆

(I tuoi figli ovunque dispersi, e/o)

I read this book almost by accident. It was a home reading assignment for my daughter Anna, who liked it and recommended it to me. It is a novel but also an autobiography, given the many commonalities between the author’s story and the Rwandan family featured in this novel. Everyone remembers the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, if only from following the news on TV. This book tells us about those dramatic events and the trauma that followed, along with the life-long attempt to reconcile, from the point of view of those who experienced them firsthand. It isn’t easy to hold together the stories of four generations of protagonists and do so engagingly—good, solid book. I am grateful to Anna’s literature teacher; she always gives me stimulating and enriching readings.

Exactly one year ago we were here, in this same room, at the same conference, presenting C# 12. Some of you in the audience were present back then. If so, please raise your hands. Twelve months later, here we are again, looking at a new version of C#. It’s the new normal; this has been happening, give or take, since the advent of .NET Core and C# 8 in 2019. Previously, C# had a new release every 2–3 years, so the release rate has doubled or even tripled recently. Is this good news? If you’ve followed forums or social media, you might have noticed some controversy about the topic. The main complaint is that the language is changing too quickly, “chasing trends,” with no valuable addition to its core.

Most of these complaints come from old-timers around my age (maybe even ten years younger because I’m seasoned) and have been in the .NET environment for many, perhaps too many years. There’s always a certain inertia, a form of resistance to change, especially when it’s rapid. But I’m seasoned enough to remember when complaints went in the opposite direction: back then, the .NET Framework (the historical, monolithic, Windows-only version) moved like a dinosaur while the world was racing ahead. New languages were blooming. Old competitors were evolving at double or triple the speed, constantly innovating, and—this is key—attracting hordes of developers. There was a critical moment when this attraction became so intense that more and more developers set aside .NET and C# to explore new directions. I know because I was one of them.

Around 2010–11, I was set to create a new, rather complex platform of REST services, and instead of reaching out for my usual .NET toolchain, I chose Python. That marked the beginning of an adventure that lasted years and included the unexpected release of some reasonably successful open-source Python projects. The reasons I decided to abandon .NET and C# were several—not least the frustration with the lack of transparency and a clear path for the .NET ecosystem, its languages, with oh-so-many frameworks enthusiastically presented and then abandoned, changes of direction, and above all, in my case, it all being closed source, which didn’t allow me to dig deeper and understand why certain things didn’t work as expected. I clearly remember when I was writing my first REST service in Python and realized that in this new ecosystem if I didn’t understand what was happening behind the scenes (in my case, with the Flask framework), I could quickly look at what was going on because the entire Flask source code, like Python’s for that matter, was available not only for consumption but it was also open to contribution. Coming from the enterprise closed-source world, it was an empowering sensation.

The discovery of Flask was an absolute revelation, not for its intrinsic features (which were great) but because it was just one of the many options. In Python space, there were dozens of web frameworks at varying stages of maturity. There was a choice and often many different approaches to solve the same problem. I could experiment freely and decide what was best for my use case. Not only was I facing a vast and diverse world, but I could also use the operating system I wanted. Linux was much less demanding, let alone less expensive, for deployment than Windows, and behold! I could use a Mac for development. Open-source, cross-platform, with a vast community not only adopting the language and the standard library but constantly forging new solutions, making them available to the same community, almost always for free. It was the way forward.

I envied that such a thing was unthinkable in my world. But unbeknownst to many, Microsoft was watching and taking notes. To the best of my knowledge, it was mainly the developers inside the corp —the dev team—who, glancing out of the ivory tower, began a campaign of internal lobbying, initially scattered and disorganized and later increasingly coordinated, which in turn led to endless meetings, discussions at coffee machines, and gradually, slowly and then more rapidly, to the advent of the .NET Core project. The metaphor of a snowball slowly rolling down a slope until it becomes an unstoppable avalanche perfectly applies here.

So, years after my departure (not an actual departure—I still worked in .NET for our legacy products), a new and unexpected .NET appeared on the scene. It was open-source, cross-platform, and open to external contributions. We could and perhaps should have a lengthy discussion on the openness to external contributions, but we can all agree that a revolution occurred and was historic in scale. At the same time, Microsoft opened up to other stacks, mainly because of Azure. I was shocked when I was proposed for a Microsoft MVP Award for my work on Python, not C#, at a time when Python had little to nothing to do with Microsoft. It made sense, as there was an urgent need to speak to developers outside its ecosystem—and perhaps even more so to those like me who had left: Hey, look, we’re back, we’re on track, and we’re not evil anymore.¹ 

And there I was, finding my old stack (which I secretly, I admit, considered only museum-worthy) back to relevance, competing on equal footing with the rest of the scene. The delay was costly, though. Even today, I meet colleagues who think modern .NET is just a new version, if not a simple rebranding of the Windows framework of old, and C# is more or less the same, way behind the new kids on the block. It’s a shame, and there are responsibilities. Some choices could have been bolder and more disruptive, starting with naming the new framework—but that’s another story.

Today, I create REST services with Minimal APIs on my Mac and deploy them on Linux via Docker at zero or near-zero cost, just as I would with Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, or any other stack. The performance is far better than Python’s (C# REST services make circles around Python’s), and the toolchain is rich and powerful, especially around the command line, while many think .NET is still a GUI/Windows thing. Quick release cycles are essential to compensate for lost time (and there was lots of it) and stay on the cutting edge, sending a continuous signal that the platform is alive, thriving, and constantly expanding.

Aldus Manutius, the renowned Venetian printer and publisher of the Renaissance, adopted the Latin motto Festina lente, which translates to Make haste slowly or Hasten slowly. This paradoxical phrase encapsulates achieving careful, deliberate progress quickly and precisely, balancing urgency with caution. I feel that, consciously or not, the .NET team is on track with Manuzio’s goal: they iterate rapidly to achieve progress, balancing urgency with caution.

Nowadays, both .NET and C# focus on performance and while there’s room for growth, the current achievements are extraordinary. We’re competitive with most stacks, if not significantly ahead of them. Frequent, more minor C# releases allow for quick adjustments. Attentive developers adopt them continuously. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in a rush (probably most of Microsoft’s long-time customers, slow-moving conglomerates and the like) benefit from performance gains and technological advantages (multi-platform deployment!) at a low cost because, while the framework and language evolve, great effort is put into preserving backward compatibility. In most cases, migrating to .NET Core and newer versions of C# requires minimal effort.

C# 12 introduced two significant features: primary constructors and collection expressions, with the latter being predominant in terms of syntactic, semantic, and performance importance. They weren’t the only new features but certainly the key ones. C# 13 innovates further but subtly—there’s less syntax and more semantics, building on last year’s new features. The improvements may be less flashy but guide developers in the right direction, often ensuring better performance at zero cost, sometimes even without us having to do anything. As we shall see, it happens because in recent releases—let’s say the last two or three— features were introduced primarily to improve the framework, which is also written in C#. Our higher-level applications benefit from all of this. It is a pattern we’ll observe repeatedly throughout this presentation.

Inspired by the historic Dahomey Amazons and founded by three of the biggest powerhouses in African music, Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia, and Oumou Sangare, Les Amazones d’Afrique have been using their voices to advocate for women’s rights since their 2017 debut. The group has never shied away from mashing up tradition and technology. Still, on Musow Dance, with the endlessly inventive production of Jacknife Lee, they lean heavily into an almost entirely electronic sound, turning up the energy several notches with booming 808s, dramatic synth slides, and bursts of vintage disco. But none of these additions ever overshadow the true soul of the music, instead amplifying the already formidable voices of Les Amazones d’Afrique’s ever-evolving lineup (source).

Musow Dance is a stunning release, and Kuma Fo is just the perfect leading track. Every component is on point, finely dispensed and precisely interleaved: voices, sound, beat, you name it. The producer, after all, is Jacknife Lee (R.E.M., Taylor Swift, U2.)

Then, there are the lyrics with their meaninful message. While they all sing in their native language (the four members are from different African countries), I could dig out the English translation from the official video, which is equally good and powerful.

She preserves life, gives the first breath
She preserves life, gives the first breath
Woman oh, oh woman
She gives the first breath

Chorus:
Whatever they say
Whatever women have to say
Is worth listening to
Life is hard, I fight with courage, let me be
Whatever they say
Whatever women have to say
Is worth listening to
You know, my life is mine, so give me space

The world was created by a woman
Mika mika mika mika mika
She preserves life
Mika mika mika mika mika

You wonder how we’re gona make it?
We decided to gather our strength and fight
Whatever it costs
You wonder how we’ll make it?

Chorus

You light up life
You light up life
To educate a woman is to educate a village
To educate a girl is to educate the world
Get up, get up, get up
Regain your feminine strength
Woman, woman, woman, get up, get up
Regain your feminine strength

I travelled to the North
People from the North told me
That women have dignity
I travelled to the West
People from the West told me
That women have dignity

I belong to myself, I’m free to do what I like
I will not accept what others want me to be
I belong to myself, I’m free to do what I like
I will never accept it anymore

Chorus

Whatever they say
Whatever women have to say
Is worth listening to
I will not be driven like a car
Woman, woman, woman

You give hope
You give hope
You give hope
You give life
To educate a woman is to educate a village
To educate a girl is to educate the world

I’ve been using LLMs (ChatGPT and Claude) more and more lately, especially for work. The more I use them, the more I understand how to leverage their capabilities. I would have never thought about sharing my reading experiences with ChatGPT before. Ethan Mollick has it right; we should all put at least 10 hours into LLMs before judging them.

Your goal is simple: spend 10 hours using AI on tasks that actually matter to you. After that, you’ll have a natural sense of how AI fits into your work and life. You’ll develop an intuition for effective prompting, and you’ll better understand AI’s potential. Don’t aim for perfection - just start somewhere and learn as you go.

It was an excellent circular tour that, to the merits of moderation-it is not too long, nor too strenuous, the ascent is always gradual, etc. - also combines the variety of the environment, shading from mixed mid-altitude broadleaf forests (hornbeams, oaks, ash, cherry, maple) to coniferous reforestations that in this case, with increasing age and size, have taken on a certain dignity.

Valpisella is a rural stone building dating back to 1872 and later reclaimed as a vacation home by the volunteer work of ANPI partisans. When I arrived, I could hear people enjoying their lunch inside. It’s a nice place; unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture.

If hiked at a brisk pace, it might take only half a day, but with a few well-deserved stops and savouring the myriad details that the various seasons can offer, it fills the whole day without difficulty.

The Corniolo/Braccina route marked my first winter hike of the season. I recently realized that, to me, daily hikes are more accessible in the winter. In summer, I’m usually too busy between motorcycling trips with the Club, family matters, holidays and, since we live close by, going to the beach.

GPS track is available here.

And sanderlings running all over the place.

[…] more and more people across the globe get their news and cues from social media. It has a scary ability to generate anxiety and rage, and it is addictive. Expert after expert I’ve talked to over the years has made the same point — in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement. This is made worse by the people who run these companies, for whom anticipation of consequences is lacking and whose first instinct is to let it all through the gate, regardless of potential damage or danger. What’s the opposite of the mommy state? Parent-free chaos.

Read her article here.

I appreciate how Swisher was an initial proponent of digital advent, so much so that she co-founded All Things Digital. Yet, that didn’t prevent her from foreseeing the troubled waters ahead.

The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print “gimme gimme gimme”, because of the Abba song called “Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight”. Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.

Long live the good old hacker spirit. Full story here.

Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare. As the old adage goes: Never meet your heroes.

Fascinating stuff. Well written, too. Read the full story here.

Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who wanted to put it all down in one place. Edited by actual editors who like editing. Designed— down to the weight of the paper, the typography, and the illustration on the cover— to make the experience of reading it enjoyable. Books are uncanny and impractical objects. A terribly inefficient way to encode information from one brain to another, but an excellent way to tell a story.

Full post here.

We have two ASP.NET 8 applications behind NGINX; one is a regular web app, and the other is an auth server built with Duende Identity Server. When the user attempts to log in to the web app, they are sent to the auth server; once logged in, they are sent back to the app, and that’s when NGINX returns a weird 502 Bad Gateway. Upon inspecting the NGINX logs, I found the following error:

upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream

Some digging revealed that NGINX has a pretty small default buffer size, and proxying auth requests (with their typically above-average-size headers) back and forth is prone to breaking that limit.

The fix is straightforward: raise those buffer sizes. Most blogs suggest doing that globally, but that seems overkill, as NGINX buffering can be configured per server and location blocks. You may want to keep the global defaults and only raise them (along with memory consumption) for locations that need it.

  location {
    ...
    proxy_buffers 4 256k;
    proxy_buffer_size 128k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size 256k;
    ...
  }

Mind you, the above values (that I found in almost every blog dealing with this problem) are likely too big and should be trimmed down. That’s my next task, using this excellent article for guidance.

The Loneliness of the Low-ranking Tennis Player, by Conor Niland, chronicles the life of players at the Challenger and Futures levels, one or two steps below the elite. Sinner, Alcaraz, and most other stars have only skimmed through these purgatorial circles thanks to their talent, and still, hundreds spend their entire career trapped in there, and it’s not as pretty as we, the laymen, may think.

In the end we won because the open source community started to converge on distributed version control and we were the only ones in the hosting space that truly cared about how developers worked at all. The only ones who questioned it, approached it from first principles, tried to make it better holistically rather than just throwing more features onto something existing in order to sell it.

Full story here. A great run-down by Scott Cahon himself on why Git and then GitHub won the version control system war.

But I follow the solar energy topic and stay up to speed, as I want to take action one day. Here are two articles I read just in the last couple of days. In many aspects, they are similar, and both draw very optimistic conclusions: solar will get unfathomably cheap.

• Solar will get too cheap to connect to the grid, by Ben James
• What Will We Do With Our Free Power?, By David Wallace-Wells

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.

Full story here.

What a great story. Teenagers who are enthusiastic about hacking and coding and have lots of fun in creative ways. It reminds me so much of my teenage years, like when assembling a fake backdoor on Lorien, my first BBS, as a honeypot to attract local hackers so I could later reach out and get to know them¹.

Long gone are those days, and I wish I still had that kind of drive.

With no commentary or narration but made up of the protagonists’ testimonies alone, it effectively evokes the excitement and enthusiasm around the early computer game industry (and software development in general) of those early years. It is also a cautionary tale about how easy it is to fall once you reach the peak¹

If you still want to follow me (I’d love for you to do so), the best option is my website where I always post first (RSS feed here), the mailing list, or Mastodon.

I learned this and other intriguing tidbits by watching The Crazy Engineering of Venice on YouTube.

Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body. Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last twenty years is ending. I’m serious. I believe that Rand in 2010 would have told you that digital marketing was all about being able to track every view and every click, so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them, is wrong today. Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. That’s because clicks are dying and attribution is dying. There’s only one way forward.

A 7 minutes video, with transcript, is available here.

Yes, he’s stating the obvious in some ways, but it’s his job to spread the word to the masses, and he’s been doing that for quite a long time. I remember seeing him on stage in San Marino many years ago when his gospel was about SEO, SERP attribution, and traceability. I am glad to find that he’s still on the go.

My colleague Stefano correctly points out that Rand’s final advice on moving where the public is today is sound and reasonable, but it is nothing new. It’s always been about that. In 2014, we went to Google AdWords and the likes because that’s where the public was back then. In the 2020s, the public has flocked to platforms’ walled gardens and digital marketers follow the herd, like a pack of wolves.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

I’m too compromised and ahead in age to make it my own. Still, I hope this movement has traction among young people, especially those in my field—optimism and activism instead of denial and despair.

Read the whole document here.

Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.

– David Foster Wallace

After the fork to the Rifugio Tissi, the crowd (literally) disappeared. We are on the Alta Via 1, which has become an international attraction since I walked it almost thirty years ago: French, Dutch, Americans, and Italians, all lining up to complete it, and I guess it is a good thing, or maybe not? I snacked on one of the two small sandwiches I had bought at a café in Zoldo, enjoying the sunshine in a surprisingly flat clearing that was undoubtedly once an alpine pasture. I was low on water but heard water running nearby as I ate. And indeed, there was a stream just a few meters from me, and I refilled my water bottle. This canteen has a water filter and costs a lot, but it grants safety and peace of mind. It is too bad it is small; I should have gotten the 1L version. 0.6L is small when you are out all day in the sun in summer, and there’s little to no water around.

The evening at Rifugio Vazzoler was enjoyable. I had dinner at a table outside, sitting with five French people and one Spaniard. The French were two groups: three guys from Paris fleeing the 2024 Olympics and a couple from Lyon. She speaks Italian and breeds horses for a living, while he is an ultra-marathon runner who is a bit introverted and sulky but definitely on the ball. After the others went to bed, I chatted a little longer with Javier from Malaga. Last year, he did the Tour du Mont Blanc solo, his first real hiking experience. Remarkable. Like everyone else (except me) at the Vazzoler, he is now doing the Alta Via 1. After so much time avoiding them, I reevaluated the Alpine hut experience. In recent years, I have opted for wild camping away from the crowds. Still, the social aspect of sharing the experience in a cosy facility after a long day of strenuous hiking makes it all magical and unforgettable. There is another great advantage to the shelter: fewer logistical difficulties and less weight (tent, sleeping bag, stove, food) to carry around, which is no small thing, especially at 54. Looming over Vazzoler are Torre Venezia and Torre Trieste, the first of which I climbed almost thirty years ago. It was good to see it again and recall those strong emotions.

After a restful night (I wouldn’t have guessed it, I was in a dormitory with 24 beds-luckily the one next to me was empty, and on the other side, I had the wooden wall-apt choice) I set off for the second and (much) more challenging stage, the one that would climb the very steep wall leading to Van delle Sasse and the fork above, then traverse the challenging Tivan Trail to Rifugio Coldai and then back to Palafavera. The climb was steady for almost 2 1/2 hours, always in an exciting environment. I never cease to be amazed at the wit of the hunters and hikers who, in ages long gone, have traced these daring routes. The Van delle Sasse is an isolated and wonderful high-altitude basin. There are no words to describe it. Almost unreachable, lonely, circled by a crown of peaks, with a flat, green plain just below the fork. It is the result of what used to be at the bottom of a massive glacier of lost epic. As I left early, I got up there first and met nobody the whole time. I rested and ate dried fruit at the Forcella delle Sasse above.

I began the rugged and steep descent, first on an equipped section (a few meters of iron cable), then on a very steep and slippery scree, and then I took the Tivan Trail to the left, which I must say I had underestimated. Very long, a continuous up and down at the foot of the looming Civetta walls. When it connects with the trail that goes up to Coldai from Pecol, it becomes a steady though not steep climb, interrupted often by exposed and equipped (again, iron cables) downhill sections, practically until the vicinity of the refuge. Tivan Trail is a wild, strenuous, exposed, lonely, precious experience. I was alone the whole time.

I arrived at the hut very tired. There, I ate the sandwich the Vazzoler guys had made me, drank a Radler (a mixture of beer and Lemon soda the Germans like to drink; it didn’t particularly quench my thirst), and walked down back for one more hour to the parking lot, where my trusty Bonneville was waiting for me.

It was a glorious day. Unfortunately, I sprained my ankle (my usual ankle) shortly after starting the climb to Van delle Sasse. I was sore but didn’t stop for a moment, and it slowly became manageable. Later, on a vertically equipped section on the descent, now 20 minutes, maybe less from the Coldai hut, I sprained the ankle again, which hurt a lot more this time. From experience, I was expecting this second accident to happen. I let out a terrible scream, I’m afraid, but I was alone, and no one could have helped me anyway. I slowly dragged myself to the hut, one step after another, hiking poles being crucial in this situation. Strangely enough, after lunch at Coldai, I could descend to Palafavera almost normally, with virtually no pain.

After the second sprain, I sat, looked at the view, and said, “OK, this is my goodbye to the mountains.” I can’t hurt my ankle that often: it’s a problem, a fragility that sooner or later could put me in serious trouble, especially since I go solo on wild trails like the Tivan. I was convinced. But at the same time, I started wondering what I could do about it. Have Dr Calderoni examine me, maybe talk to him about my problem and hear if/what can be done, even if only on the level of rehabilitation exercise (I’m very pessimistic: I’ve been exercising for years, ankles included). I’ve been thinking about the ankle braces that Jannik Sinner and other professional tennis players use. On my first day back from the trip, I ordered something similar on Amazon.

Today, I am less convinced about my goodbye to the mountain¹.

I use the reverse lookup of bash-history (Ctrl+R) daily. Still, only today (thanks to an HN comment on Bash-Onliner) did I learn that it also preserves one’s comments, which can be exploited to invoke complex commands quickly:

$ mv -n ~/Desktop/*.pdf ~/Documents/PDF_Archive/  #pdfsync

Then, you simply Ctrl-R and type “pdfsync” to recall the above command when needed. Neat.

The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos. Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the power outlet. Because that’s the world we live in. Now sprinkle some nonsense AI on top of it all and Bob’s your uncle.

– Manuel Moreale

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. - A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. […] A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little guys is how numerous they are. They’re a swarm, frequently providing little moments of comic relief as they move coal or swim through the sea. Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not.

More here.

Anyway, in the pause, I glanced at my e-mails and discovered I had been again granted the Microsoft MVP Award. It is the ninth consecutive year, and I’m grateful and happy the journey continues. At this point, I should put in some extra effort to reach the 10-year milestone next year.

Write a lot. This is alpha and omega of writing advice, the beginning and the end, and it’s that way for a reason– I don’t know anyone who’s good writing who hasn’t also put in serious hours.

– Nat Bennet

I’ve always loved libraries. They are a glimpse of the kind of ‘better world’ we all want to live in. That’s because by their very nature they are inclusive and welcoming. Anyone who walks through the doors of a library is reminded, just by inhaling the air of the library, just by being embraced by its atmosphere, to be a kinder and more caring person, and to forget, for a moment, the usual rules of our capitalistic society.

A library is a good place.

– Rebecca Toh

When I’m out hiking on my weekend hike I often spend much of the experience in contemplation. My thoughts are usually tickling at Warp 10, going everywhere possible at once, but then I ramp it back a bit and I just think about an assortment of topics at any given moment. Out in nature is really a good place for me to get things back into perspective, and I usually feel the better for it when I get back home.

– J.P. Wing

Consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel. Solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant.

Even China’s dominance in panel production, which remains a concern, does not prevent technology development and cost-cutting, at least not in the medium term.

Another worry is that the vast majority of the world’s solar panels, and almost all the purified silicon from which they are made, come from China. Its solar industry is highly competitive, heavily subsidised and is outstripping current demand—quite an achievement given all the solar capacity China is installing within its own borders. This means that Chinese capacity is big enough to keep the expansion going for years to come, even if some of the companies involved go to the wall and some investment dries up.

They sustain that low-cost, clean solar energy is inevitable and will reshape society and the planet in ways we can’t yet fathom. I sure hope things go in this direction.

When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you… This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus.

The truth is, whatever game you play in life… sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job… it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. And it’s natural, when you’re down, to doubt yourself. To feel sorry for yourself. And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt, too. Don’t ever forget that. But negative energy is wasted energy.

You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion.

– Roger Federer

Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team.

Have you ever been on a team packed exclusively with staff or principal engineers? It is not fun. That is not a high-functioning team. There is only so much high-level architecture and planning work to go around, there are only so many big decisions that need to be made. These engineers spend most of their time doing work that feels boring and repetitive, so they tend to over-engineer solutions and/or cut corners—sometimes at the same time. They compete for the “fun” stuff and find reasons to pick technical fights with each other. They chronically under-document and under-invest in the work that makes systems simple and tractable.

The best teams are ones where no one is bored, because every single person is working on something that challenges them and pushes their boundaries. The only way you can get this is by having a range of skill levels on the team.

Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, first principles, or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers.

For more advice, see the original post.

The other day, I read on about Julian Sartorius (drummer, percussionist, and artist) latest work, Hidden Tracks: Domodossola—Weissmies. He took a five-day hike from Domodossola, Italy (272 meters above the sea) to Switzerland’s Weissmies summit (4017 mt). He took his drumsticks and a recorder with him, and as he went by, he recorded many sounds, natural and not, and, most importantly, played his sticks on many different surfaces. Quoting Bandcamp Daily:

Every track on Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – Weissmies is named according to that change (i.e., “272m ↗ 500m,” “1500m ↗ 2000m,” etc.). The first few, recorded in Domodossola and its surroundings, are lively—almost symphonic. You can hear passing cars and motorcycles, people talking, dogs barking, church bells tolling. Sartorius plays a hypnotic, techno-like rhythm—sometimes on wooden houses, sometimes with clanks on metal or footsteps on grass. With each subsequent track, the music becomes sparser and quieter. Sounds of nature prevail, as Sartorius plays the rhythm on a surface of a stream, and catches the sound of sheep as they pass through the meadow. It culminates on the mountain’s summit where the only sounds are wind, snow, and ice—and a distant helicopter.

Being a hiker myself, I was immediately enthralled by this project. I listened and was not disappointed, so I bought the album to support the author. There’s also a short film about the project on YouTube that is worth watching.

just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous.

– Sean Voisen

Just yesterday, I fixed a bug in our legacy application. Once I was done, I turned to my notes to log what I’d just done. I was only partially happy with the fix, so I articulated what would have been ideal and why I didn’t achieve my goal. Right in the middle of a sentence, the solution surfaced. It was so evident and straightforward! The simple act of writing down the problem led me to the solution. Relieved, I returned to the project and promptly improved my code.

Sean Voisen is right. The act of writing clarifies thoughts and leads to insight.

The loop tour from the Montone River Valley reaches the watershed ridge overlooking the Acquacheta basin and then the main Apennine ridge at over 1,000 meters. From an environmental point of view, it is worth noting the constant presence of woods, first of oak and hornbeam, then of beech; the latter, with recent conversions to tall trees from coppice, have largely regained an appearance closer to naturalness. From a historical point of view, the itinerary is characterized by access to the very ancient (11th century) Hermitage of the Toschi or Tusci, currently being restored to be used as a farm and accommodation facility that gives hospitality to hikers, still very suggestive for its superb isolation and position set among the meadows at the top of the valley of Fosso Pian di Soia.

I risked losing the path when, just near the Hermitage, I spotted a hare a few steps away. She scampered unhurriedly away under my gaze as I was walking and not paying too much attention to the path, which seemed obvious. I missed a detour, and I recovered shortly after. Just before the hare, I kicked a harmless snake who got more scared than I did. It ran away, disappearing into knee-high grass.

When I returned to the bike, since it was still early, I decided to go up to the Muraglione Pass, descend to Tuscany, and return via the Tre Faggi Pass, Permilcuore and Predappio. It always strikes me to see tourists (alas, many motorcyclists) stopping at the cemetery in Predappio, presumably to visit Mussolini’s grave.

I published a short video on Vimeo¹; GPX track and some photos are available here.

The scenario goes like this. I have an ASP.NET Core app that authenticates with Open Id Connect. It receives a bearer token from the authentication server. Besides OIDC claims, this token has been forged with additional custom claims for use in the app. However, only ODIC claims exist when I parse HttpContext.User.Identity.Claims in my middleware. If I retrieve the token with HttpContext.GetTokenAsync and decode it, I confirm it contains all the claims I need. Where have my custom claims gone? Or, how can I get User.Identity to provide them along with the OIDC ones?

As it turns out, one must hack them into the User.Identity.Claims collection by hand. That’s done by leveraging the OnTokenValidated event handler like this:

authenticationBuilder.AddOpenIdConnect("oidc", options =>
{
    options.Authority = "authority";
    options.ClientId = "client_id";
    options.ClientSecret = "secret";
    options.ResponseType = "code";

    ...
    options.GetClaimsFromUserInfoEndpoint = true;
    options.SaveTokens = true;
    options.Events = new()
    {
        OnTokenValidated = context =>
        {
            // adds custom claims from the token into Principal.Identity
            if (context.Principal?.Identity is not ClaimsIdentity claimsIdentity) return Task.CompletedTask;
            
            var accessToken = context.TokenEndpointResponse?.AccessToken;
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(accessToken)) return Task.CompletedTask;
            
            var handler = new JwtSecurityTokenHandler();
            if (handler.ReadToken(accessToken) is not JwtSecurityToken jsonToken) return Task.CompletedTask;
            
            foreach (var claim in jsonToken.Claims)
                if (claimsIdentity.Claims.All(c => c.Type != claim.Type))
                    claimsIdentity.AddClaim(claim);

            return Task.CompletedTask;
        }
    };
});

Is there a better and less hacky way to achieve the same result? Please let me know.

We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.

This is a remarkable achievement. Two years ago, only a few would have bet on its sustainability. I’ve tried Kagi’s free tier with good results, but not as much as I would like. It’s not my default search engine—not yet, at least.

Over time, I’ve switched from free (as in “you, the user, are the product we sell”) to paid services. Years ago, I dropped Gmail and switched to Fastmail, and I could never imagine going back. I’m good with paying for excellent critical services. My data and I are not the product, and I’m invested in them staying around long-term.

Short version: ChatGPT and other similar tools do not directly learn from and memorize everything that you say to them.

Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users. Understanding this is key to working effectively with these models. Every time you hit “new chat” you are effectively wiping the short-term memory of the model, starting again from scratch. This has a number of important consequences.

More here.

In 2021, in Russian courts, the fate of 783000 people was decided. There were 2190 acquittals. Two thousand one hundred and ninety. The probability of being acquitted is 0.28 per cent.

– Elena Kostyuchenko in I Love Russia, which I’m currently reading.

This outing was conceived long ago (Trifest happen every year) and has always been postponed because of the high cost and time required. This year, we took the opportunity of the 75th anniversary to go, partly because I sensed the great interest while talking about the idea at various rallies we had last year in Italy.

We were twenty motorcycles strong. Leading such a large group across Europe for 4,000 km is no joke, but somehow, we made it through without significant issues. Energy and mood were always high, and we were welcomed with open arms by our English friends and by the other Triumph Owners Clubs attending: Germany, Sweden, and Holland. It was an excellent opportunity to strengthen the bond between us Italians and make new international friendships, laying the foundation, who knows, for future occasions.

Right.

We have been together ever since and will celebrate our 27th wedding anniversary next week. Our three sons are the fruitful result of that teenage affair.

However, the most critical aspect of this release is not technical, as Ethan Mollick correctly pinpoints in his timely What Open AI Did post:

Likely the biggest impact of GPT-4o is not technical, but a business decision: soon everyone, whether they are paying or not, will get access to GPT-4o1. I think this is a big deal. When I talk with groups and ask people to raise their hands if they use ChatGPT, almost every hand goes up. When I ask if they used GPT-4, only 5% of hands remain up, at most. GPT-4 is so, so much better than free ChatGPT-3.5, it is like having a PhD student work with you instead of a high school sophomore. But that $20 a month barrier kept many people from understanding how impressive AI can be, and for gaining any benefit from AI. That is no longer true.

He then speculates how this change will impact significant areas such as education, work, and global entrepreneurship.

And we all punish ourselves. That’s the real tragedy of this illness. We are our biggest detractors because we know what we’re capable of. Better than our teachers. Better than our parents. They always said that they could “see our potential,” but we saw ten times what they did. Every day. We saw the things we could do, in our heads, and hated ourselves for not doing them.

There are so many good lines in the article that I highlighted twelve whole paragraphs with many more deserving, and I struggled to pick one to quote here.

• I love collection expressions. Like primary constructors, collection expressions will see a significant adoption in the long run.

• Collection expressions introduce a new way to initialize common collection values in a terse, unified syntax.

• This is how we initialize collections today:

var x1 = new int[] { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
var x2 = Array.Empty<int>();
WriteByteArray(new[] { (byte)1, (byte)2, (byte)3 });
List<int> x3 = new() { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
Span<DateTime> dates = stackalloc DateTime[] { GetDate(0), GetDate(1) };
WriteByteSpan(stackalloc[] { (byte)1, (byte)2, (byte)3 });

Notice how the code is diverse depending on the type and the context. It is also verbose. Look at how we initialize an empty int array (second line); it’s lengthy and starkly contrasts with the previous line, where we initialize the same type with some actual values. In many situations, casting is needed; again, take a look at the WriteByteArray and WriteByteSpan calls.

• With collection expressions, it becomes like this:

int[] x4 = [1, 2, 3, 4];
int[] x5 = [];
WriteByteArray([1, 2, 3]);
List<int> x6 = [1, 2, 3, 4];
Span<DateTime> dates1 = [GetDate(0), GetDate(1)];
WriteByteSpan([1, 2, 3]);

We enclose items within square brackets, and that’s all. An empty collection is empty brackets. We can, of course, call functions or use variables.

• In many scenarios, the compiler will perform several optimizations. It can allocate the correct capacity or avoid copying data when unnecessary. The compiler can do that because the supported collection types are well-known and have been for a long time. We get these performance boosts for free when we switch to collection expressions.

• Let’s look at that WriteByteArray call. Let’s say that at some point, maybe months or years after it’s been used in many places, we decide to refactor the method and change the argument type from byte[] to int[]. We’d have to refactor the old-style caller to eliminate the casting, which is now an error. We don’t need to do any fix with collection expressions as they come with enhanced inference that will resolve the casting for us.

• On the first line, we’re initializing a new array (we aren’t calling a method with a signature), so with collection expressions, if we try to use var, it won’t work. In that case, we need to be explicit about the type.

• The spread operator allows us to insert variables and constants and to sort of “unroll” another collection within the new one, and it does so with optimal performance.

int[] numbers1 = [1, 2, 3];
int[] numbers2 = [4, 5, 6];
int[] moreNumbers = [.. numbers1, .. numbers2, 7, 8, 9];

foreach(var number in moreNumbers)
    Console.WriteLine(number);

It would be nice if lambdas were allowed in collection expressions, like in other languages (Python), but that’s not yet an option.

• What about custom collections? But let’s imagine I have built a LineBuffer class that inherits from IEnumrable<chrar>; it offers some custom features over its base class. I get an error if I try to use collection expression syntax on it. It is not a common .NET type, and the compiler doesn’t know how to go around it.

public class LineBuffer : IEnumerable<char>
{
    private readonly char[] _buffer = new char[80];

    public LineBuffer(ReadOnlySpan<char> buffer)
    {
        int number = (_buffer.Length < buffer.Length) ? _buffer.Length : buffer.Length;
        for (int i = 0; i < number; i++)
            _buffer[i] = buffer[i];
    }

    public IEnumerator<char> GetEnumerator() => _buffer.AsEnumerable<char>().GetEnumerator();
    IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() => _buffer.GetEnumerator();

    // etc
}

// this causes a compile error
LineBuffer line = ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd', '!'];

• We can support collection expressions in our custom types, though. It’s a two-step process. First, we implement a builder method, then decorate the class (or struct) with a CollectionBuilderAttribute. The attribute maps our type to the builder method.

[CollectionBuilder(typeof(LineBuffer), nameof(Create))]
public class LineBuffer : IEnumerable<char>
{
    private readonly char[] _buffer = new char[80];

    public LineBuffer(ReadOnlySpan<char> buffer)
    {
        int number = (_buffer.Length < buffer.Length) ? _buffer.Length : buffer.Length;
        for (int i = 0; i < number; i++)
            _buffer[i] = buffer[i];
    }

    public IEnumerator<char> GetEnumerator() => _buffer.AsEnumerable<char>().GetEnumerator();
    IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() => _buffer.GetEnumerator();

    internal static LineBuffer Create(ReadOnlySpan<char> values) => new LineBuffer(values);
}

The official documentation says the builder must be named “Create,” but that’s false. We can name it however we want as long as it matches the attribute (it’s probably still worth adhering to the suggested practice.)

• Adding collection expression support to custom types is helpful in your codebase, even more so if you’re a library author.

• The syntax of collection expressions is symmetric with that of slicing and pattern matching, a nice touch that keeps the language tidy and coherent. Take a look at this pattern matching switch:

public Grade GPA => Grades switch
{
    [] => 4.0m,
    [var grade] => grade,
    [.. var all] => all.Average()
};

• Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains Rider and most other IDEs offer full support for refactoring old-style collection initializations to collection expressions.

• What about dictionary expressions? They are common in other languages (again, Python). When asked, Kathrine Dollard of the C# design team answered that they’re thinking about it, mostly trying to understand the best design, so there’s a chance that we’ll see dictionary expressions in the language in the future.

Also see: C# 12 Primary Constructors.

The standard shouldn’t be never to make a mistake. It’s to make as few mistakes as possible, but quickly recognize, acknowledge, and address the ones you do make.

– John Gruber

In a follow-up post, I plan to address Collection Expressions (done) and maybe “type any aliases”; this is about Primary Constructors.

• We can now add a list of parameters to a struct or class declaration. This way, we avoid writing an explicit constructor method, sparing us some boilerplate code.

• What I refer to as ‘primary parameters’ are unique in that they are in scope throughout the type definition; this means they can be used anywhere within the type.

public readonly struct Distance(double dx, double dy)
{
    public readonly double Magnitude { get; } = Math.Sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy);
    public readonly double Direction { get; } = Math.Atan2(dy, dx);
    public override string ToString() => $"{nameof(Magnitude)}: {Magnitude}, {nameof(Direction)}: {Direction}";
    public double Dx { get; } = dx;
    public double Dy { get; } = dy;
}

• It’s important to note that primary constructor parameters are not class members; therefore, this. cannot be used on them. They can be considered static values, but unlike typical static values, they can also be used in non-static methods, offering a unique advantage (some black magic happens behind the scenes.)

• We no longer need to define and assign a type-level field; the compiler will do that behind the scenes when needed; if a behind-the-scenes backing field is unnecessary, it won’t be created.

• Primary constructor parameters don’t become properties and are inaccessible outside the instance. We can create properties to expose their values if needed. Record types are an exception. Constructor parameters become properties with records, and it makes sense because records are generally used as DTOs, whereas we want the option with class and structs.

• Secondary and parameterless constructors can be added to a primary constructor. They must invoke the primary, passing its values along.

public Distance() : this(0, 0) { }

• With primary constructors, we do not have a method body; how do we handle argument validation? One pattern is to perform validation at property assignation.

public string AccountID { get; } = ValidAccountNumber(accountID)
    ? accountID
    : throw new ArgumentException("Invalid account number", nameof(accountID));

public static bool ValidAccountNumber(string accountID) => accountID?.Length == 10 && accountID.All(c => char.IsDigit(c));

• I like this pattern because it brings property declaration and validation close to each other, making it easier to process and reason about the domain logic. When we perform argument validation in an old-style constructor method, we tend to separate validation and declaration, making it difficult to reconcile the two aspects, especially when we have hundreds of lines between constructor code and property declaration.

• Derived types can have a primary constructor, too; it must invoke the base class’ primary constructor.

public class CheckingAccount(string accountID, string owner, decimal overdraftLimit = 0) : BankAccount(accountID, owner)

• Old-style derived types can still derive from a primary constructor type; a regular constructor will invoke the base primary, as we’ve always been doing.

• Regarding inheritance, we can mix and match primary constructor types with old-style types, making it easy to refactor our libraries to use primary constructors. We know that adopters will have no problem deriving from our refactored types.

• Watch out for “nested captures” of primary parameter values in derived types. If both the derived and the base type capture them, and one (or both) change their captured values, we may end up with non-aligned instance values. Roslyn’s analyzer will raise a warning so we can fix our code or mute the alert with a pragma.

• Visual Studio and Visual Studio code offer built-in support for primary constructors (refactorings, etc.) That’s true for JetBrains Rider or any other IDEs leveraging Roslyn.

• The primary constructor’s original implementation dates back to C# 6 in 2015. It was publicly available in one of those version previews for a short period. Then, it was taken back to the drawing board, only to resurface with record types in C# 9 (?) and custom types in C# 12.

Also see: C# 12 Collection Expressions.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (debated, see here)

It’s very fast to build something that’s 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I’m unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result.

– Moxie Marlinspike

The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.

– Ken Thompson

His 1984 Turing Award paper on supply chain security is only four pages long and is worth reading repeatedly.

Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy,Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.

I’ve always been cautiously curious about the Tor project. I remember listening to a Tor talk at a PyCon Italy (or EuroPython?) conference, where the speaker insisted that Tor wasn’t meant for dark usages but as a means of liberation. Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy might help frame the project from that perspective.

It’s packaged as a free PDF. It’s too bad it’s watermarked, so converting it to EPUB results in a mess.

I have been gifting Serena two subscriptions to our city’s theater’s dance season for some years. She loves dance, both classic and contemporary. I thought I did not. Usually, she goes with one of her best friends. I don’t remember ever going before, and yesterday, I only went because none of her friends were available.

I know nothing about ballet, and truthfully, I expected to get relatively bored. Instead, I got excited. I sat there in the stalls, open-mouthed, the whole time. The nonstop one-hour and ten-minute show flew by; it was delightful.

Many of the dancers’ movements, individual but primarily choral, reminded me of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful sequences, particularly those in which one or more characters literally “liquefy” to the ground or otherwise amalgamate, which happens quite often in his works. I wonder if Mauro Astolfi, the choreographer, took inspiration from Miyazaki or if it was just a figment of my imagination (Serena, I later found out, had the same thoughts.)

Next year, Serena’s best friends are staying at home. There’s a new ballet fan in town.

The show’s soundtrack is a unique blend of jazz (big band hard bop, mainly), blues, and a bit of rock, which I’ve never seen before in anime and probably in movies. Even episode titles pay tribute to jazz, blues and rock tracks. We have “Valtz for Venus,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “My Funny Valentine,” and stuff like that. Adorable. Episodes may appear rambling and superficial at first glance, but they are far from that. They strike a perfect balance between comedy and thought-provoking, often philosophical themes.

Last night’s episode, “Jamming with Edward”, struck me as prescient. In 2071, Earth is surrounded by a mountain of scrap metal (mostly decommissioned satellites and wreckage from missiles, probes, and spaceships). Space junk was not a theme in 1998 when the anime was conceived, or was it? And there’s this AI, a clear tribute to HAL 9000, left active on a derelict satellite, feeling lonely, misunderstood, and abandoned. It is tremendously timely, resonating with the issues we face today.

I bought the whole Space Cowboy soundtrack. It’s the bomb.

I, like many developers who have worked on high-scale, low-latency web services over the last fifteen years, have an intimate relationship with Redis. At any new job, when you ask where the data is, and someone points you to a server address with port 6379, you know you will meet an good, reliable friend there.

Redis is indeed an awe-inspiring project. I have met Salvatore (antirez), its author, several times. He’s a down-to-earth and brilliant guy. I admit I feel nostalgic for Redis’ “heroic” period when Salvatore was at the helm and Redis was for developers, not enterprises.

I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

Brilliant.

But the reality is that you can’t build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that’s kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can’t justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty promises of someday changing the world.

Full article here.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to present at an international conference once again. On May 9th, I will speak at the ABP Donet Conf'24. My session, titled C #12: What’s New and Interesting, is on a topic I’m passionate about.

With the alignment of C# and Dotnet Core release cycles, the C# release cadence has increased (we’re on a yearly cycle now), while feature quantity has reduced for individual releases, which is good. The faster, smaller iterations allow for quicker course corrections, and introducing fewer new features makes it easier to embrace the changes.

The ABP Dotnet Conf'24¹ will be held online on 8-9th May; the lineup and agenda look great, so reserve a ticket before they are sold out, and see you there!

In the past few weeks, I have spoken about OAuth2 at two different conferences, and OAuth2 has been precisely the subject of my work for the past few months, and it still is now. It goes like this: I study and implement things, and while doing that, I say to myself, hey, this could be an exciting topic for other devs, too. I let the idea cool down for a few days, and then, if it still seems good, I start looking for a fitting call for papers. Magic happens if the proposal is accepted: I am forced to turn from a superficial connoisseur to someone close to a field expert. That’s the level of competence to aim for if one wants to talk publicly, especially on a technical topic.

Something new happened yesterday. As I was writing the OAuth2 documentation for the next iteration of our APIs, I realized I could reuse some of the material from my live sessions. In the talk, it made sense to dedicate a few minutes to explain the OAuth2 Authorization Code Flow, so I used Obsidian Canvas to draw two diagrams, one with a high-level view of the flow while the other would zoom into the details. I could now take the first one, streamline and simplify it, and then include it in our official documentation. And that’s what I did.

That presentation took a while to prepare, but the delivery was good. It took me to a new level of expertise, and part of that work landed in our product. It was all well worth the effort.

I wish I was morally bankrupt enough to be a productivity guru. I could, like, charge $50k to stand behind a podium in a hotel ballroom and spout nonsense at desperate people in an attempt to get them to buy my book and planners. It would be awesome.

– snakeyjake

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH sshd on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other systemd-based Linux systems. That backdoor watches for the attacker sending hidden commands at the start of an SSH session, giving the attacker the ability to run an arbitrary command on the target system without logging in: unauthenticated, targeted remote code execution.

As the excellent timeline of the xz open-source attack quoted above remarks, this will likely be remembered as the first known supply chain attack on widely used open-source software. This story screams a nation-state-level hacking attempt to me.

As an open-source maintainer with limited bandwidth, I know very well how tempting it can be to give up control and how difficult it is to judge someone’s intentions. I feel for the original author of XZ. A relevant discussion is currently going on on HN.

I am increasingly convinced that returning to purchased music is the way. I’ve been listening to streaming services for so long that I almost forgot the accomplishment of listening to music I own. This music was so significant when I first listened to it that it was worth buying and carrying along over the years. It’s tangible, too: it’s sitting right next to me, on my hard disk and my phone; I can look at it and, yes, touch and move it as I please, as I can with my original CDs. The same goes for the new music I buy on Bandcamp or elsewhere.

I can download music from Spotify, but that’s rented music that I cannot move away from the app.

It’s also relevant that a much more significant part of my money goes to the artists when I purchase their music, and I’m glad for that because I’m thankful. I want their business to be healthy and prosperous so that I may enjoy more of their art in the future.

I’m listening to Dance Cadaverous from Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, a song I probably last listened to ten years ago. Speak No Evil is one of the 100 CDs that, back in the day, I started collecting from The Best Jazz (pre-1980) Ever Released Digitally. I never completed that collection. I may resume it now, although future purchases will likely be just MP3s.

The feeling is having a good, untiring Linux connoisseur (and of all the various ancillary packages) sitting right next to you, always ready to lend a hand. I also think, and I’m probably wrong (but my experience seems to bear this out so far), that because these are all simple questions about stuff well carved in stone, hallucinations are unlikely to occur.

My assistant today was ChatGPT 3.5, which is very old by today’s LLM standards. It is also free to use, which makes it all even more impressive.

In any case, I thought the characters were more or less fictional until today, when I found that, no, the main ones are historical, and the story is, by and large, true.

In 1600 a Dutch galleon arrived on the shores of a small fief on Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It was the first Dutch ship to reach Japan. Among the crew was an English navigator, William Adams, who managed to gain the trust of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord who became a shogun (the military leader of the samurai caste) in 1603. Adams eventually rose to the rank of Hatamoto, the shogun’s direct retainer. How did an English navigator come to serve the shogun? To answer this, we must first look at the situation in Japan at the time and the policies of Ieyasu.

The History Today article, available here, confirms that the main plotline has solid historical roots. By the way, I just realized it’s Tuesday. A new episode is due today, at least in my part of the world.

It is a nice hike, with the ascent that becomes quite challenging in the final part, towards the ridge tops, which, once reached, you’ll follow for a long time, partially on a forest road, before plunging back downhill, initially following a lovely descending ridge da makes most of the descent quite pleasant. During the ascent, several detours were necessary to get around the landslides that originated during the infamous May floods (there are still several traffic lights on the roadway leading up from Forlì, all due to the restoration works following the flood). Hats off to the volunteers who maintain the trail: they have had to work hard this year. At some point, they had to ‘dug out’ complete new sections to get around the more enormous landslides.

Primroses, wild saffron, and buttercup suggest that, yes, we are indeed entering spring. All of this botanic expertise is due to PlantNet, the app I installed the other day, which works well, except that it has to be online, which is only rarely possible on the trail. Fortunately, it can also be used on previously taken photos, which I did once I was back in Bocconi. I also installed an app to recognize birdsong; it’s called Merlin Bird ID, received a lot of praise, and should work offline, but I have yet to try it.

The best moment was the twenty or so minutes I spent lying down to rest at the highest point before embarking on the descent. I listened to the silence that silence was not: the sounds of the forest, the birds, the wind, the heat of the sun on my skin. My mind wanted to divert to new paths, and I tended to fall asleep several times, but I consciously tried to bring my mind back to listening. A meditation exercise that restored my energy levels: I felt recharged and rested when I got up.

At the start, be careful not to take the trail in reverse (as I initially did): after crossing the beautiful humpback bridge known as the Brusia, do not take the trail directly in front of you, but turn sharply left, walk about 30 meters above the Montone river, then take the trail to the right, marked “Valbura”.

GPX track and some photos here.

In a beautiful essay published in Waiting for God, Simone Weil reminds us that study serves to develop attention, and almost no matter what is studied, even a mathematical exercise that turns out to be incomprehensible is fine. “Without feeling or knowing it,” Weil writes, “that seemingly sterile and fruitless effort has brought more light into the soul. One day one will find the fruit of it (…) in any sphere of intelligence, perhaps entirely unrelated to mathematics.”

– Alice Rohrwacher 🇮🇹

Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more. In fact, it seems that, down the ages, around a fifth of societies have practised cannibalism. While some of this people-eating may have been done simply to survive, in many cases, the reasons look more complex. In places like Gough’s cave, for example, consuming the bodies of the dead seems to have been part of a funerary ritual. Far from a monstrous affront to nature, cannibalism may be a way of showing respect and love for the dead, say some archaeologists.

More here.

I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: “May be dangerous to your health.” One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said “Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?” and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example.

– Frank Herbert

Take care of yourself. Sleep. Eat. Exercise. Rest. Relax. Take care of other people, as best you can. People are important. Software is just fun.

– Lars Wirzenius, in his noteworthy 40 years of programming

Sleaford Mods’ barbed lyrics perfectly augment Orbital’s concrete-heavy digitalism. Mods’ James Williamson lambasts the people, “blaming everyone in the hospital, everyone at the bottom of the English Channel, and everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

I guess it’s about telling people to take responsibility for their own actions, you know, all these politicians don’t come from out of nowhere. Somebody keeps voting them in. So who might that be? –Paul Hartnoll, Orbital

The official video is good, too.

Yesterday, I discovered I could dictate text notes to my iPhone, even offline. It works with Obsidian, WhatsApp, and any other app where I need to enter text, like the Safari search box. I suck at entering text on the phone. I also hate WhatsApp audio messages, but I often recur to them as, again, I suck at typing text on the phone. I can instead dictate those messages, and they will render as text as if I typed them; what a revelation!

It’s not entirely a discovery; I knew I could do that and did it occasionally, primarily for quick lookups. However, I underestimated how good and valuable the feature is.

This morning, I discovered the obvious: I can do the same on the Mac. The MacBook keyboard has a microphone function key, and guess what? It’s for voice dictation, and it works seamlessly. I can even start typing on the keyboard, switch to dictation on the fly, and then go back to typing without interruption. It works offline and has built-in multi-language support, just like iOS. Voice dictation will likely change how I take notes, send messages, and perform other tasks. Take notes, for example; until today, I rarely write them down when away from the keyboard.

While technology has evolved in the last fifteen hundred years, the human brain has not. And few people in the ancient world cared as much about the challenges of attention and distraction as monks. Our reasons might differ today, but we have much to learn nonetheless.

The focus problem predates the advent of the modern age with all its continuous, unstoppable, but always alluring background noise. I wonder if ADHD was also a thing back then and how many were possibly affected. We will never know.

I am always particularly excited when I can present the stuff I’m currently working on. Being forced to share as I learn encourages me to go deeper into the topic to reinforce my comprehension and better explain it to the audience—a win-win situation.

While the Rome conference is free, if you are considering WebDay in Milan (you should), feel free to use my speaker coupon P-SPEAKER10 for a 20% discount. If you come to any, don’t be shy and come to say Hi!

For those who have found their meaning, their place in the world, and what they feel they want to live for, death is just one part - inevitable, but not frightening - of a good life—a death all woven with life, which has the smile and soft touch of a newfound embrace. I wish myself, anyone, such a death.

– Benedetta Tobagi, La Resistenza delle donne

The best founders I know — no matter their company’s scale — thrive on doing customer support directly. There’s literally no better way to understand the pulse of your customer base, what features to build next, or where systems are breaking down. It’s always upside.

It profoundly resonates with me. For context, we’ve been a small company in the market since 1991, making us quite the rare bird (we have seen so many software companies come and go that it is unbelievable).

My untiring co-founder, Stefano, still does customer support daily, while I chime in occasionally when needed. Every Friday at 2.30 pm, our dev and support teams have a joint call to assess what’s going on on the frontline, to get the pulse and to check if there are new and unexpected issues the customers are experiencing with our products. This call is complimentary to the live chat that both teams share daily. This continuous feedback cycle and the resulting quick release cycle have been the key that allowed us to stay relevant and endure for such a long time.

Of course, founders doing customer support delays other fundamental activities, and sometimes that’s stressful, but it is worth it.

As the title suggests, McPhee’s latest album is a journey into outer space. The album consists of six instrumental pieces, all captivating, enjoyable, and cohesive; they all serve as each other’s natural continuation. Along with the sound of his guitar, the musician uses tape loops, small percussion sounds, and a few synthesizers here and there. The result is a hypnotic moonscape reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey².

The album avoids easy psychedelia and opts for a more meditative approach while meeting expectations perfectly. Sometimes, it sounds like Brian Eno’s early ambient phase and the more dilated Tangerine Dream. Dean McPhee has created an otherworldly experience with just a few elements; minimalism is key.

I used to cherish music, I used to religiously collect, catalog and enjoy every album on my iPod. I could navigate the endless folders and find that exact song that I needed for that precise moment. Spotify killed that, I listen to what it suggests and just accept that it will go away when it decides to rotate it out. Spotify trained me not to look too hard, to let the flow be, and if that awesome song is gone or removed, don’t worry, we still have a million more.

And also:

The main screen is littered with podcasts I don’t care about, nor have I ever listened to. It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I can’t cancel my subscription yet, as I would risk being lynched (we’re on the family plan), so I’m experimenting with digital purchases of selected music that I know I want to keep for the long run and that I deem worth sustaining directly. The current plan is to buy it on Bandcamp, immediately download it, and then listen to it, probably on Doppler. I will also drop a quick review on my website (if it is not exciting enough to share here, it’s probably not worth buying in the first place.) I’ve been gathering old-style music sources lately (I primarily follow music critics and websites I respect and listen to live stations like NTS, Radio Paradise, and Bandcamp Radio). For the time being, Spotify will stay and serve as a secondary discovery agent.

Yes, I will spend more on music, and it’s okay. I won’t buy everything I listen to anyway; the idea is to only invest in the true gems. In a way, this all looks like going back to old and brick-and-mortar music shop days but actualized, and I like it a lot.

“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry.

– John Carmack

I’d be tempted to call bullshit on this one, but it’s coming from Carmack, so hey, let me think about it for a minute (it’s not the first time I’ve caught him endorsing AI).

There’s a common belief that suffering is necessary for pleasure, or that evil is necessary for good, like the change of the seasons. It’s one of those ideas that sounds like wisdom, but when you think about it, it’s not actually true. There are some people who are happy all the time, and other people who are miserable all the time. I think suffering and evil are like taking a wrong turn on a journey. Taking a wrong turn sometimes happens, and some good can come of it. But it’s never necessary.

– Ran Prieur

Anyways. I had all my ON DELETE CASCADE constraints nicely configured, but related records in child tables were not being deleted when I deleted the parent. Perplexed, I looked it up.

Foreign key constraints are disabled by default (for backwards compatibility), so must be enabled separately for each database connection.

The quick fix was to add "foreign keys=true;" to our connection string. Alternatively, the application can also use a PRAGMA foreign keys = ON; statement to activate them once the connection is established, but it doesn’t make sense, as we need constraints active throughout the connection’s lifecycle.

Many skeptics about the impact of AI are focused on the flaws that LLMs have today: hallucinations, short context windows, slow answers, and so on. These are legitimate concerns, and, if AI advancement were to stop, they might prove to be huge issues in the utility of AI. But AI is advancing rapidly, and some of these concerns may soon vanish, even if others (like hallucinations) are not completely solved.

What that means is that it is fine to be focused on today, building working AI applications and prompts that take into account the limits of present AIs… but there is also a lot of value in building ambitious applications that go past what LLMs can do now. You want to build some applications that almost, but not quite, work. I suspect better LLM “brains” are coming soon, in the form of GPT-5 and Gemini 2.0 and many others. When they do, you can swap them into the almost-but-not-quite-working applications for a fast start. This is similar to the philosophy of the big AI labs, which build ambitious solutions (OpenAI’s GPT agents, Google’s connections to Gmail) which will benefit when the next version of their core LLMs are released.

So don’t just build for what is possible today, but what is possible in six months, if this pace of change continues. At this point, I think things are unlikely to slow down in the near future, and focusing on where things are heading, rather than where they are, prepares you for a world of continuing change.

– Ethan Mollick

We upgraded our web application from .NET 7 and let the CI pipeline do its work. Finally, we checked the application in the browser to ensure everything was okay, but unfortunately, we got a 502 Bad Gateway error. The Nginx logs revealed that the app was rejecting connections, which was unexpected because we didn’t make any changes there. Further investigation showed that the web app listened on port 8080 while Nginx was reverse-proxied to 80. So that was the problem. But why did the port change?

The change to the port number was made because of the need to provide a good usability experience when switching to a non-root user. Running as a non-root user requires the use of a non-privileged port in some environments. Since port 80, the previous default port, is a privileged port, the default was updated to port 8080, which is a non-privileged port (source)

It all makes sense now. In hindsight, it was our mistake. We should have explicitly declared the port in our launch settings anyway. As the Python Zen says, “Explicit is better than implicit.”

It is inadvisable on the hottest summer days when the nearby forests offer more cover from the scorching sun, but it is a real treat throughout the rest of the year.

Reasons for environmental interest, other than in individual uncommon botanical species (at least red juniper and turkey oak), lie mainly in the wild valleys overlooked by what is the “turnaround” as well as the highest point of the itinerary, Monte Tiravento (and even the name testifies to the splendid isolation of the site) and in the beautiful ruin of the medieval Montalto Tower. A final appendage to see monumental oaks further embellishes the hike. I met several groups on the trail, and we’re in February, so I’d expect these ridges to be crowded in spring and autumn.

For GPS track, photos, and stats click here.

Anyway, Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s recent Paying people to work on open source is good is a stellar post on the topic of open-source sustainability.

My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.

Full article here.

What makes it so unique is the raw, unedited “I’m filming for my family” feeling that there is to it. He’s sweating, swearing, worrying and freezing like, you know, the rest of us. Colin seems a lovable, down-to-earth guy, I like his attitude. Oh, and I would’ve bailed much sooner than him.

I don’t think content creators are at risk with Sora, not anytime soon, but, as Marquees repeatedly notes in the video above, just one year ago we thought AI-generated video was a joke.

John van Wyhe, the academic who has led the “overwhelming” endeavour, said it showed the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.

“It also shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was,” Van Wyhe said. “There is this vast sea of things which might be an American or German news clipping about a duck or invasive grasshoppers. That’s been the fun part, not the formal books but the other things … all of which pool together to make the theories and publications we all know.”

The Guardian article is here. I had to dig a little to surface the actual catalog on the Darwin Online website. Many titles even have links to their text contents and images.

A few steps into his public philosopher career, Spinoza found himself exiled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam. That made him cautious and adept at avoiding an even worse fate, which was entirely possible in the mid-1600s.

Although Spinoza was certainly a champion of political and intellectual freedom, he had no interest in being a martyr for them, and, if his life teaches anything about thinking in dangerous times, it is how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand. Not for nothing did he wear a ring inscribed with the Latin word “Caute”: “Be cautious.”

Full article here.

I don’t use wikis in my projects; I prefer documentation to stay with the project, usually in a dedicated directory, and publish it on a dedicated site through GitHub Pages. But today was different as I opened a pull request for PaperMod, the Hugo theme I use on this website. Someone asked if I could update the documentation too. Right, too bad it’s impossible to do that.

The first ticket on this goes back to 2016. This limitation makes GitHub wikis impractical for any team project (maybe 90% of those on the platform), confining them to personal projects or small experiments. No wonder so many Wikis appear as outdated on GitHub.

It would be better to withdraw the feature given that GitHub offers a much more compelling solution in Pages.

People living in remote Indigenous communities are as happy as those in wealthy developed countries despite having “very little money”, according to new scientific research that could challenge the widely held perception that “money buys happiness”.

Researchers who interviewed 2,966 people in 19 Indigenous and local communities across the world found that on average they were as happy – if not happier – as the average person in high-income western countries.

Who would have thought.

Full article here.

Let me start with the headline: Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model. The statistics show this, but so does a month of our informal testing. And this is a big deal because OpenAI’s GPT-4 (the paid version of ChatGPT/Microsoft Copilot) has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other model has come particularly close. Prior to Gemini, we only had one advanced AI model to look at, and it is hard drawing conclusions with a dataset of one. Now there are two, and we can learn a few things.

Things are getting hotter in the LLM space, and competition is always good.

Full article here.

He argues that the advent of the ads market tainted the original blogging scene in the mid-2000s, and something similar is now happening in the YouTube scene. Today’s independent blogger is not in it for the money (there’s none to be had) but for passion and an (unconscious?) belief in indie web ideals, and these are precisely the forces that drove the first wave of bloggers in the 2000s.

We modern bloggers, however, inhabit a tiny self-indulging bubble that is not comparable with the original scene. But you know what, I feel comfortable in it.

With roots in the world of fashion, there exists a cyclical principle suggesting that every two decades, previously popular trends “every 20 years or so the trends that were once popular will begin to be on the forefront again.” What’s old is new again. However, these recurring trends aren’t just rip-offs. They are remixed and reinterpreted through the lens of a new generation. We are, perhaps, in a 20 year resurgence for the indie web and blogging.

More here.

Have you ever wasted some time watching a youtube video, that got you kind of interested because of the click-baity topic, but in the end turned out to be nothing more BUT click-bait? Or have you ever wanted to just quickly recall what a video that you’ve watched some time ago was about? Just Tell Me has you covered!

You can run it from the website or locally on the command line, with your OpenAPI key and the LLM model of choice. I have not looked at the code, but I understand it leverages the video transcript to do its magic¹. I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s been good.

As far as I’ve been able to figure out so far, the things my mind is best at are details and systems. It‘s part of what makes me a good programmer: I can hold a lot of detail in my head about how a system fits together, I can mess around with it more easily than most people, and I can pick up on details other people might miss, such as potential bugs. A lot of the things I enjoy (and seem to be pretty good at) are those where there’s an underlying system to figure out and master – computer games, martial arts, even cooking.

Then there’s a few things my mind struggles to handle. Most of them revolve around people.

I’m not always great at figuring out what someone else is thinking, or feeling, or even dropping hints about. I can take educated guesses, for sure, but I don’t necessarily get it right. It also takes a lot of work to keep track of all the social cues going on whenever there’s a conversation happening, and all the social conventions most people seem to follow without even thinking. I can think of several times when someone has asked me how my weekend went, and it’s completely slipped my mind that the appropriate response is to ask them about theirs too. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that I’m having to concentrate so much on the rest of the social cues that I take longer to catch up with how the conversation is supposed to go.

It took some balls to write his next one: My brain, and how you can help me. Respect.

The footage, captured directly by NASA’s Mars rovers - Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance - unveils the red planet’s intricate details. These rovers, acting as robotic geologists, have traversed varied terrains, from ancient lake beds to towering mountains, uncovering Mars’ complex geological history.

As viewers enjoy these images, they will notice informal place names assigned by NASA’s team, providing context to the Martian features observed. Each rover’s unique journey is highlighted, showcasing their contributions to Martian exploration.

Stunning, and mesmerizing.

In case you can’t see the embedded video (hi mailing list folks), here’s the link.

Backup of a Postgres schema:

pg_dump -h host -d source_database -U user -n schema_name -F c -f schema_dump_file.dump

Restore of a Postgres schema:

pg_restore -h host -d dest_database -U user -n schema_name schema_dump_file.dump

All primary and shared knowledge, I am sure. Another item of note: the DB name is hard-coded in pg_dumpall files, so if one wants to restore on a database named differently, one must go into the dump file and edit it by hand.

Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega a publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened. […] Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.

Full article here.

Rio Petroso is a rather complex and articulated circular tour, with frequent environmental changes, configuring itself among the most arid of the entire Park territory; I wouldn’t do this route at the height of summer.

Another peculiarity of this hike is the dense presence of ruined houses, precious testimonies of the glorious Apennine civilization history that lasted until the late 1960s, with the departure of the population to the valley floors or, more often than not, the plains.

The geological peculiarity is constituted by the so-called “Verghereto marls” (named after the typical locality where they, in fact, overbearingly characterize the landscape), which appear especially along the ridge of Rio Petroso: they give rise to a barren environment, with erosion phenomena reminiscent of those of gullies but with, in addition, an almost exotic suggestion in their lunar nudity.

When I got to the car, I realized I had forgotten the headlights on. It’s a good thing I hurried on the route (and recently changed the battery), or I would have been stuck there, 10 km from civilization, with no phone signal—an adventure I gladly spared myself.

GPS track, map, pics and all the frills are here.

It is in Italian¹ and you need to login in order to see it (sorry, I don’t have control over it.)

Dungeons & Dragons played an outsize role in popularizing fantasy literature, ideas, and themes, as well as inspiring many of its devotees to create their own. Roleplaying, as a formal activity, owes nearly its entire existence to the phenomenal success of D&D. Even more remarkable is the extent to which the computer and video game industry, which is bigger and more profitable than the music and movie industries combined, owes a huge debt to the example set by D&D. If you play any game with classes or levels or experience or hit points today, that’s because of Dungeons & Dragons.

More here.

I started playing D&D in high school in the mid-80s. Does that make me a Stranger Things kid? I’m still trying to figure that out, but D&D significantly impacted me growing up. It probably didn’t save my life like it did for others, but to an introvert like me, it offered an incredible opportunity to go out, meet and talk to people, challenging myself and my imagination.

Right before Christmas, I presented myself with an AD&D 5th edition complete set, partly out of curiosity but also nostalgia. I loved browsing the modern editions of the Player Handbook, Master Manual, and Monsters Book—so many good memories. I later bought the Starter Kit, hoping to play at least an evening session with my “kids,” as two of them were about to return home from University (the third is still with us.) We never played that session. In hindsight, it was a stupid idea.

I was puzzled as the same container ran smoothly in our test environment but not in production. I ruled out resource problems (memory or disk full, maybe?) but then compared the Docker Engine versions we run in test and production. Both were old (20. xx when 25 is available), but interestingly, the production version was older. I searched online and found a two years-old ticket hinting at some problems between .NET 8 and older Docker versions.

I updated the Docker Engine to the latest version, and guess what? The .NET 8 container now starts without making a dent.

crontab: installing new crontab
crontab: crontabs/<user>: rename: Operation not permitted
crontab: edits left in /tmp/crontab.hgmsOH/crontab

Puzzled, I checked whether my user permissions were all right, if the disk was full, and several other things. Long story short, the fix was this one:

sudo chattr -i /var/spool/cron/crontabs/<user>
sudo chown <user>:crontab /var/spool/cron/crontabs/<user>

Somehow, the user’s crontab file had become immutable.

I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made this very clear.

More here.

If you’re an old-time Substack subscriber, you already know because I transferred all the active subscriptions to the new platform. I’m writing for the occasional passerby looking for fresh content.

Why I left Substack? Two reasons:

1. It’s full of garbage, has a nazi problem, and it is monetizing on all this stuff. I don’t want to be associated in any possible way with an enterprise like this, and I certainly don’t want to offer them visibility, no matter how little.

2. Substack does not support RSS-alimented campaigns, so I had to copy & paste every single post from my website manually. That is tiring and error-prone.

Because of 2, Substack was not my platform from the get-go. I knew, but I was willing, as an experiment, to put in some extra work in exchange for the visibility.

I’m not willing to compromise on 1.

PKCE is an extension to the Authorization Code flow to prevent CSRF and authorization code injection attacks. [..] It was originally designed to protect the authorization code flow in mobile apps, but its ability to prevent authorization code injection makes it useful for every type of OAuth client, even web apps that use client authentication (source).

In a nutshell:

1. The client requests a single-use authorization code to an authorization server. In doing that, it includes a code_challenge with the request.
2. The server responds with the authorization code if the client is recognized and authorized.
3. The client requests an access token in exchange for the authorization code. It includes the code_verifier used to generate the original code_challenge;
4. The server confirms that the verifier is the same one used to generate the code challenge; hence, the client is the same.

Plenty of excellent documentation is online (like here.)

I was interested in code_verifier and code_challenge generation. Here’s my implementation:

/// <summary>
/// Provides a randomly generating PKCE code verifier and it's corresponding code challenge.
/// </summary>
public static class Pkce
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Generates a code_verifier and the corresponding code_challenge, as specified in the rfc-7636.
    /// </summary>
    /// <remarks>See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7636#section-4.1 and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7636#section-4.2</remarks>
    public static (string code_challenge, string verifier) Generate(int size = 32)
    {
        using var rng = RandomNumberGenerator.Create();
        var randomBytes = new byte[size];
        rng.GetBytes(randomBytes);
        var verifier = Base64UrlEncode(randomBytes);

        var buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(verifier);
        var hash = SHA256.Create().ComputeHash(buffer);
        var challenge = Base64UrlEncode(hash);

        return (challenge, verifier);
    }

    private static string Base64UrlEncode(byte[] data) =>
        Convert.ToBase64String(data)
            .Replace("+", "-")
            .Replace("/", "_")
            .TrimEnd('=');
}

Usage is as simple as:

var (challenge, verifier) = Pkce.Generate();

In ASP.NET Core you don’t usually need to mess with PKCE as the framework supports it very transparently, but the project I’m working on right now is bare and to the bones, with no ASP.NET Core in sight, so I had to bring my own implementation. Fun stuff.

The structure [of most Miyazaki’s works] is not bound by the western-culture Aristotelean three act setup, conflict, pay-off, and resolution… its about showing you the sweet and sour of life. The loss and the love and the beauty all at the same time.

– Guillermo del Toro

For more context, see: Move review: The Boy and the Heron.

NTS Radio is a family of like-minded and passionate individuals, dedicated to supporting exciting music and culture through online radio and events. NTS uncovers the best of the musical past, celebrates the present and cultivates the future of the underground music scene, and prides itself on being open-minded and experimental. (source)

I’m certainly a latecomer, but NTS Radio is the bomb. I have not opened Spotify (whose algorithm I find dull and repetitive) in the last week, not even once. I go straight to NTS to find the best and most diverse music from all genres, played by DJs and independent radio stations worldwide. Absolute banger.

I took a few steps outside and saw an aged, bald man on the porch, more or less twenty meters away. He was standing still, looking back at me. He had nothing going on, no jacket, scarf, or cap, just a sweater, cargo pants with summer shorts on top, canvas shoes, and half gloves, and that was it. It must have been 0 or 1 degree Celsius. It was so cold. Since he wasn’t fleeing, I approached him and asked if everything was okay and if he needed any help². He nodded and said, “Yes.” That broke my heart.

He then told me, “My teeth hurt”. From what I could see, he was utterly toothless. I asked if he had entered the building looking for warmth, and he nodded again. I told him we could get him something warm, and then, if he allowed us, we would call for help. “Yes, he again answered. I told him to wait a few minutes, and then we went to our apartment to get an old jacket, an oversized, warm scarf and a woolen cap. “He must have run away by now,” I thought as I went down with everything tucked under my arm, but when the elevator door opened, I found he had made his way into the building again and was waiting for me. I helped him wear the jacket and wrap his scarf around his neck. As I called for an ambulance, he laid down again on the floor; all gathered up to keep what little warmth the new clothes could give within.

We waited about 20 minutes. The ambulance driver made him get up abruptly, pulling him by the arm and scolding him because “you don’t go into buildings; it’s forbidden.” The nurse wanted to return our clothes because “we have blankets”; it took a while to explain that we didn’t want them back and that he would need them the following day anyway when he inevitably ended up back on the street.

His name is Fabio, and he is 60 years old.

Upon his death in 1543 in Frombork, Poland, Copernicus was buried in the local cathedral. Over the subsequent centuries, the location of his grave was lost to history. There were several unsuccessful attempts to locate Copernicus’s remains, dating as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries. Another failed attempt was made by the French emperor Napoleon after the 1807 Battle of Eylau. Napoleon held Copernicus in high regard as a polymath, mathematician and astronomer. In 2005, a group of Polish archaeologists took up the search.

More here.

The goal of the pg_rman project is to provide a method for online backup and PITR that is as easy as pg_dump. Also, it maintains a backup catalog per database cluster. Users can maintain old backups including archive logs with one command.

We’ve always been doing our Postgres backups the rudimentary way via pg_dumpall, which works and is purely logical (one can restore across different Postgres versions), but pg_rman maintains a catalog and has point-in-time recovery.

I might want to look into it at some point.

A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning.

Unsurprisingly, the animation is stunning, and the complex story is beautifully narrated. Mahito Maki, the protagonist, is a kid grappling with inner conflicts and insecurities who recently lost his beloved mother in a dramatic accident. The fantastic and very “Miyazakiest” events that unfold once he and his father reach his mother’s family’s rural residence will help him cope with his loss. This movie’s central themes are dealing with strife and loss, letting go of selfishness, and embracing living for and with others. As is often the case with Miyazaki, while the protagonist is a kid (and a young audience may appreciate the content, possibly on a more superficial level), the target audience is adults.

I read that The Boy and the Heron has autobiographical features. Like Mahito, Miyazaki lost his mother as a kid and was forced to evacuate from the city to the countryside during the war. His works commonly find children leaving the city for the rural areas, only to meet the magic and fantastic once they get there. I cannot help but draw a parallel with J.R.R. Tolkien, who devoted much of his youth exploring the outskirts of Birmingham with his brother Hillary. That “kind of lost paradise” and the rural people who inhabited it were instrumental in inspiring the Hobbits and Hobbiton… but I’m getting off-topic.

To ground ourselves, we can start with two quotes that should inform any estimates about the future. The first is Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Social change is slower than technological change. We should not expect to see immediate global effects of AI in a major way, no matter how fast its adoption (and it is remarkably fast), yet we certainly will see it sooner than many people think.

It’s an insightful read that pairs well with Simon Wilson’s 2023 round-up. Also, his 30-second fake video of himself telling things he never told is impressive.

find content/post/*.md -type f -exec \
    sed -i .bak 's|https://nicolaiarocci.substack.com|https://buttondown.email/nicolaiarocci|g' {} +

It is pretty straightforward. find looks for all markdown files in the content/post/ directory. On each file, sed performs a search-and-replace action. Notice that I use | instead of the standard / as a separator for the search-and-replace pattern , and that’s because the pattern itself has /s in the URLs so I need to differentiate. Also, on macOS, the -i parameter requires a backup file argument ("*.bak") to make a backup copy before the update. This argument is unnecessary in newer sed versions and will perform an in-place update if not provided.

Later, I realized I would be better off if I removed the call to action from my posts and added it to the footer template instead. That way, I’d only have one place to edit or update it in the future, and my RSS feed (and newsletter updates, as they draw from the RSS feed) would be clean of unnecessary spam. In hindsight, this a move I could’ve made many years ago (2010?) when I installed Hugo for the first time, but hey, better late than never. But how could I delete calls to action from all my 5K posts? With a variation of the above command, of course:

find content/post/*.md -type f -exec sed -i .bak '/

It is the same logic as above, but we’re replacing the matched string with a “delete all lines till the end of the file” pattern this time. I must admit that this one was trickier to pull off and required a discrete amount of trial and error.

I have to say, I’ve found no greater professional joy than working with a tight group of people to ship and support our own products. And for those products to find people willing to trade their own hard earned treasure for a little bit of ours. Betting on an idea — and seeing it through — is enormously fulfilling. The creative and intellectual stimulation is beyond compare. Especially when you’re the first customer for anything you make.

– Jason Fried

I also dropped web analytics. I’ve not counted visits or any other metric for years; I realized I’m not interested and certainly don’t need metrics for motivation. I happen to hate Google Analytics UX so much that I always wanted to replace it, but never got around to doing that. Besides, from my small experiments, web metrics are unreliable. Just today, Manuel Moreale’s little analytics experiment surfaced on my RSS reader:

[…] we were discussing the discrepancy between log numbers and the ones coming out of the various analytics platforms and were noticing how they all spit out different data. Which to me makes no sense. Still, it’s an interesting topic and I decided to run a little experiment to gather more info on the subject.

His article is worth reading. He ran four different GA-alternative analytics platforms on his website for a short period and obtained unpredictable and differentiated results. His conclusions corroborate my impression: trust web analytics sparingly, if at all. They might make sense on professional websites (and I’d like to argue against that, too, but maybe in another post), but for blogs? They do not serve any useful purpose other than slowing down the whole thing.

Bring back self-hosted blogs, reinstall a feed reader, make your feed icon prominent on your blog. Blogs + Atom/RSS is the best decentralized social media system we’ve ever had! And yes I am saying that as co-author of ActivityPub: self hosted blogs is the best decentralized social networking we’ve had.

– Christine Lemmer-Webber

2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most “interesting development in the academic field of Artificial Intelligence that dates back to the 1950s. Here’s my attempt to round up the highlights in one place!

The links contained within the post are also valuable. You may know Simon’s website if you are interested in LLMs and AI. If you don’t, I suggest you start following him, preferably via his RSS feed like real hackers do.

One night, in a small New Mexico town, a girl who works at a local radio station and an older reporter boy listen to a recording of some strange noises. Through the radio and its listeners, throughout a single night, they uncover a series of sighting stories that, from clue to clue and radio testimony to radio testimony, bring them close to uncovering something big.

It has a distinctive retro soundtrack, and its beauty is the pleasure of the stories told. At the center of everything always remains the mystery the two protagonists try to investigate in one night, approaching the truth from testimony to testimony. A good part of the film lies in the classic elements of science fiction, namely the discovery (perhaps) of something from another planet; another part, however, is the creation of the overwhelming sense of excitement of two people from a small provincial town who increasingly feel they are part of something important.

The photography, lighting, and camerawork are stellar:

At the midpoint, Patterson wows with a tracking shot that seems to race a half-mile down a quiet street, take a left-hook through a parking lot, sprint through an ongoing basketball game, and zip up the crowded bleachers before plunging out of a window. It’s effective razzle-dazzle that will probably get the young Oklahoman hired to make something 20 times The Vast of Night’s budget. Yet, the ambition behind it is just as impressive – as is the crew’s creativity at spinning financial limitations into magic."
–Amy Nicholson, Variety.

“The Vast of the Night” is a small, independent, character-driven debut film that perfectly captures America’s province life in the 50s and cleverly leverages those atmospheres. Inventive and charming, it is also a homage to The Twilight Zone, The War Of The Worlds (the radio station name is WOTW), and others.

Serena found it slow, especially at the beginning. I can understand that: the first twenty minutes are a long walk-and-talk between the two protagonists, but oh boy, look the world-building (and camera work) happening right there!

Inspired by Adactio, I am considering a different, less demanding approach. Instead of one review for every book, I may post one general review at the end of the year. I plan to start the article with the first book of the year, keep it as a draft, update it with every new book I read, and publish it by the end of the year. Individual notes should be short, one or two paragraphs at most, maybe with a rating. This solution would reduce the number of book-related posts, also benefitting, I suspect, most of my readers. Also, this allows me to leverage a couple of new features on my website: the table of contents and active title links (which I can then use in my library page).

I might as well adopt Adactio’s scoring system:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars mean a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars mean a book is good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars mean a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

Most ratings would fall in the two- to three-star range.

I’m starting this year. When a previously posted, more detailed review is available, I’ll link it, and only repost the first paragrafe in this page.

The sorrows of young Werther, by J.W. von Goethe

(I dolori del giovane Werther, Einaudi, traduzione di E. Ganni)

★★★☆☆

“The first Dandy in European literature, Werther ignited the sensibilities of an entire generation, that of the Sturm und Drang, which made him a timeless hero of the rebellious culture that prefers the intensity of feeling to the aridity of reason”. To modern eyes, the reading is sometimes disturbing, preconfiguring Werther as the prototype of today’s stalker (he goes so far as to consider the suppression of the now unattainable love). Still, one has to refrain from judging a text out of the context and period in which it was written. The writing is superb, fluent, and accessible for a text published in 1774—Enrico Ganni’s Italian translation is excellent.

Happiness, as such by Natalia Ginzburg

(Caro Michele, Einaudi)

★★★☆☆

A mother already advanced in years but still young, and a son physically distant and even more distant in ideas, needs, affections, and sorrows. A son for whom the mother resents but from whom she cannot detach herself, and the last, unbreakable umbilical cord is made of letters alone. It is a novel of many scattered characters, divided by incommunicability and destined for loneliness. I was struck by the precise description of society and culture in the early 1970s (the novel was published in 1973) and the non-trivial (for the time) theme of homosexuality, treated effectively.

The ancient hours, by Michael Bible

(L’ultima cosa bella sulla faccia delle terra, Adelphi)

★★★★☆

A few troubled characters move through the area south of the Appalachians, one of America’s poorest and most religious (evangelical) areas. Though tormented, the characters refuse to admit their defeats. They seek redemption in love in memory and drugs, trying to bridge frailties and family conflicts, coming to terms with God’s cumbersome presence, and accompanied by the feeling that they are moving forward but can only look backward. There is much poetry and poignancy in this beautiful and passionate tale. Micheal Bible is a talented writer who knows the places, culture and society he narrates, and it shows.

Milano calibro 9, by Giorgio Scerbanenco

(La nave di Teseo)

★★☆☆☆

A collection of twenty-two noir tales about the ruthless Milan of the 1960s: the sacred triad of crime, sex, money, and power is present on every page. The characters in these tales are driven by aching and losing loves, vices and addictions, or fatal sexual attractions. The stories were originally published in weekly magazines that were then in vogue, first and foremost Novella 2000, of which Scerbanenco was a longtime editor. At the time, Novella 2000 was not the tabloid magazine we know today but a popular literature magazine (hence the name). Only some of the stories are captivating; some are not well written, and noir is not a genre that interests me, but I got this book to understand the literary Milan of those times better, and I got what I wanted.

Ferrovie del messico, by Gian Marco Griffi

(Laurana)

★★★★☆

If you are looking for adventure, you will find plenty and taste great literature with this novel. There are so many characters to follow between Asti, Italian Social Republic, February 1944 and then up and down the railroads of Mexico between the 1920s and 1930s, all rich and exciting, never flat or predictable, masterfully orchestrated by an author who manages to keep the events narrated in perfect balance between comedy and tragedy, never dull despite the length (824 pages). Gian Marco Griffi is the best modern Italian author I discovered this year.

ADHD workbook for adults, by Tara Wilson

(ADHD negli adulti, independently published)

★★☆☆☆

A relative of mine was recently diagnosed with ADHD and this short introductory book allowed me to learn more about it. I didn’t find it particularly enlightening (much of what it contains can be found online), nor is the author particularly titled to talk about it (she is a professional coach), but perhaps because of this the content remains simple, and serve its purpose.

High, by Erica Fatland

(La vita in alto. Una stagione sull’Himalaya, Marisilio)

★★★☆☆

Himalayan fiction has accustomed us to stories of climbers tackling Everest and travelers seeking spiritual experiences in Buddhist monasteries. But what do we know about the people living in that region? Erica Flatland tells of the peoples, cultures, and societies that have inhabited the high areas in the Himalayas since time immemorial, and to do so, she takes a long, slow journey through these remote areas, encountering characters and places full of stories to discover. High is an excellent reportage that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Codice Jury, by Jury Chechi

(Longanesi)

★★☆☆☆

Jury Chechi won the Olympic title in the rings at Atlanta in 1996 and was third at Athens in 2004. Chechi’s bronze resulted from his attempted comeback into the sport at 35, well above the average age of a male gymnast. Even at 54 (his current age), he’s astoundingly in shape. He’s one of my idols. The news that he authored a book on calisthenics primarily dedicated to older adults couldn’t be ignored by me. I recommend this work if you’re starting and looking for guidance, motivation, and solid routines, not so much for the expert.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

(Einaudi)

★★★★☆

In the middle of a cold night in 1980, Bobby Western dons his wetsuit and dives into the black depths of Mississippi Bay. There, he catches sight of the outline of a plane with nine bodies in the cabin, their eyes empty and their arms outstretched in an icy embrace. What happened to the phantom’s tenth passenger? It sounds like a thriller and is also that, but also much, much more. The author’s classic themes are all present, only disguised in a story that is only seemingly and partially different. The Passenger requires commitment and concentration: there are many closed discussions, varied and more or less recurring characters, numerous flashbacks and juxtapositions, but it is amply worth it.

McCarthy’s final diarchy consists of this work and its natural continuation, Stella Maris, centered on Bobby’s schizophrenic sister, Alice. Together, the two volumes make a modern masterpiece.

Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

(Einaudi)

★★★★☆

In The Passenger, we hear the story of Bobby Western, salvage diver, physics expert, former race car driver, and grieving brother who is still in love with his beautiful sister who killed herself. This very sister is the protagonist of Stella Maris, the book’s title being the name of the psychiatric facility she admitted herself to. The text is set in 1972, and here (spoiler alert), we discover that ten years before The Passenger events, Bobby was in a coma after a car accident and brain dead. The doctors wanted Alice to agree to stop life-support. Mind-blowing. The whole text comprises seven sessions with her therapist, Dr. Cohen, rendered in pure dialogue and, therefore, more linear than The Passenger. Stella Maris can be read without its companion, but I would not advice doing that.

Born to run 2, by Chris McDougall and Eric Orton

★★☆☆☆

I’ve been back to running after a long hiatus, and this book helped me get back on track with the right, lightly-hearted approach. The fundamentals are solid (the barefoot-like technique is the way), the 90-day training plan is a good platform, the nutrition hints are remarkable, and I appreciated the injury-treatment segments. There’s too much chitchat for my liking, though, with many stories, anecdotes, and non-technical, gospel-like content. Some chapters are unattractive to the experienced runner (running with dogs, the music while running debate, and training with scooters?). This book targets the newcomer and the veteran runner switching to the barefoot technique. The first book in the series, Born to Run, was the commercial hit introducing barefoot running to the masses. This one is trying to be both a sequel and something different that can live independently. Meeting all these goals was a complicated bet.

Blind’s man bluff, by Susan Sontag

(Immersione rapida, Net)

★★★☆☆

This book made a lot of noise when it came out in 1998. Back then, most of the events narrated were unknown to the general public. The cold-war stories contained within are as enthralling as spy, maritime and Cold War stories can get. This book is still relevant today, as it does an excellent job of recounting the Cold War craziness and revealing how close humanity got to shooting his own feet, and we never knew.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

(Cime Tempestose, BUR)

★★★★☆

What a weird work of fiction. I was expecting the usual romantic story between noble landowners in late 19th-century England, full of heartbreak and probably opposed by their respective families, the difficulties of rural life, or both. I found myself immersed in a much darker, twisted and sick version of the story, in which every single character is flawed, and there is not a single light of hope. A few weeks passed since I read it, and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. This book was well ahead of its time (1847) and still challenges the readers today. As I read, I could not help but think, “What kind of sick author would write a thing like this?” Emily Brontë’s life was not easy, and many experiences of her and her family percolated in the novel in one way or another. I found an [excellent review][1] on Goodreads, and I’m using it as a guideline for pondering this novel. For as an oddball as it is, this book is a must-read.

L’umanità è un tirocinio, by Domenico Starnone

(Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

Getting to know my beloved Starnone better through the literary fascinations that turned him on, the sharp reflections on authors and texts, and his very personal “shattering” of articles representing a lifetime’s thoughts on writing and writing was terrific. “The texts collected here owe what little good they possibly hold to the forty-five years of passionate, enjoyable daily conversation with Anita; time has passed too quickly.” It was not an easy read, mainly because most of the mentioned texts I had never read before, but worth it. My to-read list has surely grown much longer now.

The overstory, by Richard Powers

(Il sussurro del mondo, La nave di Teseo)

★☆☆☆☆

I found it overly dull and did not finish it. Strange, because it sounds like a book I’d love. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.

La mossa del matto, by Alessandro Barbaglia

(Mondadori)

★★★☆☆

Alessandro Barbaglia’s La mossa del matto (The fool’s move) tries to be three things in one: the life story of chess champion Bobby Fischer, a reconciliation dialogue between author and father, who died too soon, as well the tracing of a daring parallel between Fischer’s relationship with Russian champion Boris Spasskij and that of Achilles and Ulysses of Homeric memory. In our neck of the woods, we say that too much is crippling, and this work runs the risk. More here.

Disasters, by Daniil Charms

(Disastri, UTET)

★★★☆☆

Daniil Charms was considered a children’s author and could not stand children all his life. While his whimsical fairy tales populated illustrated books and magazines, giving him something to live on in the silence of his room, he also feverishly wrote tales for adults, equally imaginative but inhabited by an excruciating melancholy, as in fairy tales went wrong. More here.

Land and sea, by Carl Schmitt

(Terra e mare, Adelphi)

★★☆☆☆

Land and Sea is an essay in short story form written in 1942 by Carl Schmitt. Subtitled “A consideration of world history told to my daughter Anna,” this essay recounts and summarizes the geo-historical-legal evolution of our planet since the discovery of the New World. The originality of the work lies in the author’s identification of the Earth-Sea dichotomy as the driving force of human history. More here.

Medieval callings, by Jacques Le Goff

(L’uomo medievale, Laterza)

★★★☆☆

Medieval Callings comprises eleven essays by internationally renowned medieval historians. Somewhat deceptively, only Jacques Le Goff’s prestigious name appears on the front page, as he authored the introductive essay and handpicked and curated the collection. Each piece presents a nuanced profile of a significant social or professional Middle Ages group. Warrior knights, monks, high churchmen, criminals, lepers, shepherds, artists, and prostitutes, all prominent figures of medieval society, are depicted here with great detail. More here.

Being wolf, by Kerstin Ekman

(Essere lupo, Iperborea)

★★★☆☆

I saw a wolf: that’s the phrase Ulf, a hunter and former forestry inspector now in his seventies, has been brooding, unable to confess to anyone since he spotted a majestic specimen at dawn on the first day of the year. Something clicks inside him, and Ulf, one of the most respected men in the village in deep Sweden where he lives, feels an increasingly solid and intimate connection with the creature. They both are hunters and loners, but why does he feel like an intruder? More here.

No sleep till Shengal, by Zerocalcare

(Bao)

★★☆☆☆

Zerocalcare is an Italian cartoonist whose strips, especially in the form of illustrated books, have surged to an iconic level in the last decade. His drawing is excellent, but it is with his writing that, I think, he conquered fame. His stories are fun to read and yet profound and vibrant, all at the same time. Also, he often touches on themes nobody else covers, at least not in the comics world. It was the case with Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria, his graphic reportage from Syrian Kurdistan and the Syria-Turkey border. The author visited the area with other volunteers to support the Kurdish resistance. I think Kobane Calling did a lot in raising awareness of the Kurdish situation, at least here in Italy (an English edition was published too.) More here.

Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

(Il rosso di marte, Fanucci)

★★☆☆☆

Regarding space-related topics and scientific research, Casey Handmer’s blog is one of my references. So when Casey started his Mars Trilogy Technical Commentary and I learned about Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, I was instantly intrigued. In Casey’s opinion, KSR’s Mars Trilogy is “one of the finest works of literature ever composed.” It took a couple of weeks of futile resistance before I gave in and ordered the first book in the series, Red Mars, a 420 pages tome that attempts to depict a scientifically credible human colonization of Mars. More here.

Sanguina ancora, by Paolo Nori

(Mondadori)

★★★☆☆

Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus. More here.

Uomini, boschi e api, by Mario Rigoni Stern

(Einaudi)

★★☆☆☆

“I wish everyone could listen to the song of the partridges as the sun rises, see the deer on pastures in spring, the larch trees reddened by autumn on the edges of rocks, the darting of fish among the clear waters of streams, and the bees gathering nectar from the flowering cherry trees. In these stories, I write about village places. These natural environments are still livable, about the beautiful social insects that are bees, but also about ancient jobs that are slowly and inexorably disappearing.” More here.

This one marks my very first technology-assisted hiking adventure. It may seem weird for someone who’s been hiking for so long, is a notorious geek and is a professional computer programmer to have never used technology before. A trail map and sometimes a compass were all I was used to, and deliberately. I wanted to avoid technology in this aspect of my life. I welcomed the orientation challenges and superbly looked down at the crowds of phone-smartwatch-compulsive hikers I met on the route. Alas, 2023 was the year I surrendered my motorcycling habits to intercom systems and GPS navigation, and that spoiled me. In a couple of situations yesterday, the app spared me some trouble by warning me of the wrong direction I was going. Nothing major. I would’ve realized the error and backtracked, but being these the shortest and coldest days of the year, I appreciated not risking getting caught by dusk. Also, I found that I can turn on voice-assisted navigation as I do on my motorcycle, and that’s nice (albeit surreal - walking alone in the wilderness, miles from anybody, with a voice coming out of nowhere and whispering when I should take turns on the trail): it avoids looking at the cellphone all the time so I can stay focused on the experience even more, I suspect, than before when the don’t-get-lost alarm bell was constantly ringing in the back of my head.

And then, of course, there’s the selfish and ego-boosting pleasure of sharing your achievement with the masses. I mean, look at this beauty!

The Poggio Montironi hike was an excellent circular tour, advisable all year round and especially suggestive in winter because of the barren and scenic ridge (perhaps too sunny in midsummer) that culminates with the more than 1,000 meters of Poggio Montironi. Near the destination stands an always-open bivouac that can be useful as shelter. At the same time, the ancient castle of Spescia, reduced to ruins but with considerable environmental value, on the return ridge gives the hike additional reasons for interest.

Caution on the descent: Two or three turns could be more noticeable, but they are well reported in the GPX track. A fallen tree (surmountable) interrupts the trail near the ford of the Rio Sasso.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a demographer. I study population. And my first love in fantasy was, of course, Middle Earth. How many people live in Middle Earth? Being a demographer, I was mainly interested in the data side of things.

Tolkien is frustratingly vague about population. He almost never gives us estimates of settlement sizes, and many of the larger metropolises of Middle Earth (like Pelargir) never actually appear on the page. Sizable armies make frequent appearances, yet because his adventurers almost exclusively traverse the wilds of Middle Earth, we rarely see where those soldiers are coming from.

Almost every attempt to estimate population in Middle Earth extrapolates from army sizes. This is no surprise since those are some of the only numbers Tolkien does provide and, furthermore, historically, this is also how ancient populations in the real world are often estimated, so there are some credible rules-of-thumb out there.

I wanted to take a new approach.

As a long time Tolkien fan, I truly enjoyed How Many Hobbits? A Demographic Analysis of Middle Earth.

I always struggle a bit with I’m asked about the “hallucination problem” in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines.

We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM’s hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful.

It’s only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a “hallucination”. It looks like a bug, but it’s just the LLM doing what it always does.

– Andrej Karpathy

As a Kahneman reader, I appreciated the Thinking Fast and Slow analogy proposed at about half-length in the video: “System 1” (fast automatic thinking, rapid decisions) is where we’re now; “System 2” (rational, slow thinking, complex decisions) is LLMs next goal. Also, I suspect Karpathy’s intriguing idea of LLMs as the center of a new “operating system style” is not too far off from what will emerge soon. The final segment on AI security and known attack vectors (jailbreaking, prompt injection, data poisoning) is also super interesting.

On his website, Karpathy also has a promising zero-to-hero video series, “a course on building neural networks from scratch, in code.”

I presented on the same subject at a DevRomagna meetup a few months ago when C# 12 was in preview and still had several moving parts. Now that the final release is out, it will be interesting to return to the topic to consolidate my knowledge. I suspect that of the many reasons I challenge myself to speak publicly, enriching my knowledge is prevalent. As the adage goes, for learning a subject, nothing beats explaining it in front of a knowledgeable audience.

If you will attend the conference (you should!), remember to meet me and say hi!

Update: the session is now available online.

    await using var sw = new StringWriter();
    await using var w = XmlWriter.Create(sw, new() { Async = true });
    ...
    await w.FlushAsync();
    return sw.ToString();

Will emit this output:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><...

There’s nothing inherently wrong with UTF-16, but XML is usually UTF-8, so one must do something about it. StringWriter exposes an Encoding property, but it is read-only for unknown reasons. One might think that given that the XmlWriter allows setting its own Encoding value, something like this would work:

    await using var sw = new StringWriter();
    await using var w = XmlWriter.Create(sw, 
        new() { Async = true , Encoding = Encoding.UTF8});
    ...
    await w.FlushAsync();
    return sw.ToString();

But it doesn’t. Over time, I’ve seen a few different ways to get out of this dead end, some more performant and or less verbose than others, but my favorite is resorting to a custom StringWriter:

    public class Utf8StringWriter : StringWriter
    {
        public override Encoding Encoding => Encoding.UTF8;
    }

Armed with this, it is trivial, as it should have been from the get-go, to obtain the desired output:

    await using var sw = new Utf8StringWriter();
    await using var w = XmlWriter.Create(sw, new() { Async = true });
    ...
    await w.FlushAsync();
    return sw.ToString();

    // returns  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><...

The whole .NET framework has seen fantastic performance improvements, top-class multi-platform support, and remarkable streamlining, but some baffling pitfalls are still hidden in some of its less obvious parts. StringWriter not supporting UTF-8 out-of-the-box is one of them.

.NET 6 and its successors have the method built in within LINQ, but I needed it in a .NET Standard 2.0 class library, so I was out of luck. My implementation is simple, not different from others I found online, and should also work fine with old .NET releases. Here it is:

    public static IEnumerable<TSource> DistinctBy<TSource, TKey>(this IEnumerable<TSource> source, Func<TSource, TKey> keySelector)
    {
        var keys = new HashSet<TKey>();
        foreach (var element in source)
        {
            if (keys.Contains(keySelector(element))) continue;
            keys.Add(keySelector(element));
            yield return element;
        }
    }

In the following usage example, I will get back all unique objects from the original sequence, distinct by their Name property:

    var uniques = mySequenceOfObjects.DistinctBy(x => x.Name);

I later went to check the official .NET 6+ implementation. They support an optional equality comparer , which I don’t need, but their base implementation is similar to mine (they use deferred execution as well).

By the way, years after its open-sourcing, I still get thrills when I realize I can always look at, let alone contribute to, the .NET source code.

Born to Run 2

I’ve been back to running after a long hiatus, and this book helped me get back on track with the right, lightly-hearted approach. The fundamentals are solid (the barefoot-like technique is the way), the 90-day training plan is a good platform, the nutrition hints are remarkable, and I appreciated the injury-treatment segments. There’s too much chitchat for my liking, though, with many stories, anecdotes, and non-technical, gospel-like content. Some chapters are unattractive to the experienced runner (running with dogs, the music while running debate, and training with scooters?). This book targets the newcomer and the veteran runner switching to the barefoot technique. The first book in the series, Born to Run, was the commercial hit introducing barefoot running to the masses. This one is trying to be both a sequel and something different that can live independently. Meeting all these goals was a complicated bet. Authors: Chris McDougall, Eric Orton.

Immersione rapida (Blind’s Man Bluff)

For decades, American submarines have roamed the depths in a dangerous battle for information and advantage in missions known only to a select few. Now, after six years of research, those missions are told in Blind Man’s Bluff, a magnificent achievement in investigative reporting.

This book made a lot of noise when it came out in 1998. Back then, most of the events narrated were unknown to the general public. The cold-war stories contained within are as enthralling as spy, maritime and Cold War stories can get. This book is still relevant today, as it does an excellent job of recounting the Cold War craziness and revealing how close humanity got to shooting his own feet, and we never knew. Authors: Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette L. Drew.

Cime tempestose (Wuthering Heights)

What a weird work of fiction. I was expecting the usual romantic story between noble landowners in late 19th-century England, full of heartbreak and probably opposed by their respective families, the difficulties of rural life, or both. I found myself immersed in a much darker, twisted and sick version of the story, in which every single character is flawed, and there is not a single light of hope. A few weeks passed since I read it, and I’m still trying to come to terms with it. This book was well ahead of its time (1847) and still challenges the readers today. As I read, I could not help but think, “What kind of sick author would write a thing like this?” Emily Brontë’s life was not easy, and many experiences of her and her family percolated in the novel in one way or another. I found an excellent review on Goodreads, and I’m using it as a guideline for pondering this novel. For as an oddball as it is, this book is a must-read. Author: Emily Brontë.

L’umanità è un tirocinio (Life is an apprenticeship)

Getting to know my beloved Starnone better through the literary fascinations that turned him on, the sharp reflections on authors and texts, and his very personal “shattering” of articles representing a lifetime’s thoughts on writing and writing was terrific. “The texts collected here owe what little good they possibly hold to the forty-five years of passionate, enjoyable daily conversation with Anita; time has passed too quickly.” It was not an easy read, mainly because most of the mentioned texts I had never read before, but worth it. My to-read list has surely grown much longer now. Author: Domenico Starnone.

Il sussurro del mondo (The Overstory)

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

I found it overly dull and did not finish it. Strange, because it sounds like a book I’d love. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years. Author: Richard Powers.

Looking at the rsync documentation, I learned about the nifty --rsync-path=PROGRAM option:

Use this to specify what program is to be run on the remote machine to start-up rsync. Often used when rsync is not in the default remote-shell’s path (e.g. –rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync).

The example caught my attention. I could perhaps leverage this option to perform a user switch before executing rsync (now performed on the remote machine). As further research confirmed, it can be done:

rsync --rsync-path 'sudo -u backup rsync' -a --delete host:source destination

It didn’t work immediately because my user was not a sudoer, but that was an easy fix:

cat > /etc/sudoers.d/myuser << EOF
myuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/rsync
EOF

As you can see, not only must the user be a sudoer, but it also needs to be able to sudo with no password. One last minor issue was that ‘backup’, being a service user, had no shell access. That was another easy fix:

sudo usermod -s /bin/bash backup

Now my rsync-with-a-different-user command works like a charm. I do have some mild security concerns, though. My user is a sudoer (can only sudo rsync, though¹), and ‘backup’ now has shell access. As password logins are turned off, and SSH keys-only access is allowed to the machine (and I’m the only person holding those keys), everything’s still reasonably safe. Are there better ways? Please let me know.

This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I’ve been using a tool made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily. That tool is a text editor. The best one there is: Vim.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking along a dirt road in the seventh century Middle East. The sun is hot, the air is dry, your feet are tired. It’s been a long journey, by boat and foot, from your home in Constantinople to where you find yourself now: outside of the walls of the mountainous river city of Antioch. In the bright sunlight, you strain your eyes to catch a distant glimpse of the sight you’ve come all this way to see – and then suddenly, you do. A bright stone pillar, stretching as tall as a church dome with an unsteady-looking wooden platform; and atop it a tiny, bedraggled, flinty old man.

You’ve found him: the Pillar Saint.

To our modern eyes, this is a profoundly weird image – but it would have been a recognisable, even iconic, one if we were living in the early medieval Middle East. To explain how we got here – and how that guy got on that pillar - we need to step back and tell the origin story of one of the most recognisable characters in medieval life: the monk.

More here.

events = Events(tuple(f"on_{i}" for i in range(5)))

for i in range(5):
    events[f"on_{i}"](i)

The C# language provides a handy way to declare, subscribe to and fire events. In C#, an event is a “slot” to which callback functions (event handlers) can be attached - a process referred to as subscribing to an event. Events adds this mechanism to Python. It originated as a side experiment (I was a C# transfugee then) that I later adopted as an Eve dependency. It slowly got some traction besides my projects. Read more on the project’s GitHub page.

• Work on my open-source projects
• Present at conferences and local meetups
• Write some articles here and there
• Blog as usual

Then, one day, someone nominated me for the award. I was surprised, baffled and thankful, and I did not expect to pass the selection process. I was genuinely shocked when I received the first award. Being in the MVP program has been a happy and rewarding ride, and I’m glad the journey continues for another year.

It took me an embarrassing time to realize that, while successful, my docfx updates (dotnet tool update -g docfx) were being ignored. An old, Homebrew-installed version of docfx was being executed at my launches —a simple which docfx revealed the issue. brew uninstall docfx finally set the updated, dotnet-installed version free of its chains, and it is now merrily churning websites.

A similar issue emerged between Homebrew and .NET 8 Preview only a few days ago. Lesson learned I’m not installing dotnet tools via Homebrew anymore. Or maybe, I might stay clear of Homebrew altogether.

Installation went well, but then I turned to the command line only to find that dotnet --list-sdks was still and only showing version 7. Yet, the 8 Preview was sitting there at its canonical location at /usr/local/share/dotnet/sdk, where the v7 was also listed.

Puzzled, I tried a few things, but the quick fix was to simply brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies dotnet and, boom, both versions 8 Preview and 7 became immediately available. I suspect that brew uninstall only removed the symlink from .NET canonical location to the Homebrew cellar, which magically solved the SDK visibility problem.

TL; DR. Homebrew recipes don’t play nicely with .NET canonical installer. To make all my SDK versions visible to .NET, I had to forego the Homebrew installation, which did not uninstall the SDK itself, but simply unlinked it.

Anyway, today I found a bug in bpython, and that’s that Python’s decimal.getcontext() does not work with it.

bpython version 0.24 on top of Python 3.11.3
>>> import decimal
>>> decimal.getcontext().prec = 6
>>> decimal.Decimal(1) / decimal.Decimal(7)
Decimal('0.1428571428571428571428571429')

If you run the same lines in the standard Python REPL, what you get instead is:

bpython version 0.24 on top of Python 3.11.3
>>> import decimal
>>> decimal.getcontext().prec = 6
>>> decimal.Decimal(1) / decimal.Decimal(7)
Decimal('0.142857')

Further experimenting revealed that, as a workaround, setting DefaultContext works as expected:

bpython version 0.24 on top of Python 3.11.3
>>> decimal.DefaultContext.prec = 6
>>> decimal.Decimal(1) / decimal.Decimal(7)
Decimal('0.142857')

I suspect this has something to do with threads, as decimal.getcontext targets the current thread while DefaultContext is global. I went to the bpython repository only to find that a ticket was already opened in 2021. I added my DefaultContext observation there.

Some remarkable quotes:

Of course these are extremely impressive responses, sometimes astonishingly so; thus I totally understand why you and others have been paying attention to it.

The most immediate impression is the quality of the wordsmithing. It’s way better than 99% of copy that people actually write. It’s definitely not like a Markov model that uses the most predictable way to continue what’s already been said. On the other hand there are surprising lapses there too, as typical of any large system.

Answer #10 reads as though it’s the best answer yet. But it’s almost totally wrong!

It’s amazing how the confident tone lends credibility to all of that made-up nonsense. Almost impossible for anybody without knowledge of the book to believe that those “facts” aren’t authorititative and well researched.

I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a “singularity” in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.

Once enabled, the new logger shows you the restore phase, followed by the build phase. During each phase, the currently-building projects are at the bottom of the terminal, and each building project tells you both the MSBuild Target currently being built, as well as the amount of time spent on that target.

The new MSBuild terminal logger is not the default. It must be opted-in with the tl option of the dotnet build command. Here’s what it looks like for a complex, multi-project and multi-target solution:

Now, if you’re doing .NET programming within an IDE like Rider of Visual Studio, this all might seem of little importance to you, but rest assured as soon as you have to look at CI logs or if you use the command line in your workflow a lot as I do, this is pure bliss.

Interestingly, this marks only the first step in a series of upcoming MSBuild UX improvements: “We hope to use this logger as the foundation for a new batch of UX improvements for MSBuild, including aspects like progress reporting and structured errors in the future.” Color me excited.

I appreciated the accurate and skillfully woven account of Bobby Fischer’s incredibly successful yet troubled life. The intersection between Fischer’s biography and actual episodes of the author’s and his dad’s lives works well, too. The attempt to bind the Fischer/Spasskij relationship to that of Achilles and Ulysses, albeit intriguing and often fitting, seems unnecessary, always risking breaking the fragile balance between the three narratives. Somehow Barbaglia manages to keep it all together.

Before getting into this book, I knew very little about Bobby Fischer. He’s known as the American genius who beat the unbeatable Russians at chess, but there’s much more to him than that, and this book does a great job at telling.

It pleasantly surprised me that they’re built as a purely artistic expression. All sculptures (as Mohit rightfully refers to them) are unique and not for sale. Check them all out on his website (via).

The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance.

Usage:

networkQuality -v

Example output:

==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 44.448 Mbps (Accuracy: High)
Downlink capacity: 162.135 Mbps (Accuracy: High)
Responsiveness: Low (73 RPM) (Accuracy: High)
Idle Latency: 50.125 milliseconds (Accuracy: High)
Interface: en0
Uplink bytes transferred: 69.921 MB
Downlink bytes transferred: 278.340 MB
Uplink Flow count: 16
Downlink Flow count: 12
Start: 13/05/2023, 15:04:13
End: 13/05/2023, 15:04:27
OS Version: Version 13.3.1 (a) (Build 22E772610a)

It supports Apple’s Private Relay, offers some configuration options and allows setting up your own server. More info here.

At the dawn of the USSR, this desperate fantasy of his was tolerable only if it was confined where it was least dangerous, in children’s literature. Back then, adults were the children to be motivated and consoled with uplifting novels aimed at glorifying the rise of the proletariat, a literature Charms refused to adhere to.

Thus, while socialist realism raged outside, Daniil Charms uncovered impossible worlds in the folds of reality. Gossipy older women tipping over the window, curious people breaking their watches trying to seize the moment, men buried alive rejoicing at the beautiful funeral, birds equipped with teeth (or maybe not), deadly challenges at cucumber blows, caterpillars with their snouts covered in dust.

This book is an arsenal of incredible stories circling for a long time, only clandestinely in samizdats, illegal books recopied by hand or typed in secret. Credit goes to Paolo Nori, who revealed to the Italian readers the greatness of this pioneer of the literature of the absurd. Nori selects and assembles hundreds of narrative fragments, alternating with excerpts from the diaries, in which Charms lays bare his tragic everyday life. The fresco of tightrope walking characters and unbelievable animals is thus interwoven with the minute account of a sour life lived on the fringes of literary society until the gloomy eye of the Party rests on this wacky dissident.

The Soviet Union tried multiple times to erase Charms by letting him die in an asylum. They finally succeeded on February 2, 1942, when famine killed him in the psychiatric clinic in which he was confined.

Most of these things were written when socialist realism triumphed around, and their author knew very well that he could never publish them in his lifetime. Yet, by reading his diaries, all this “nonsense,” as Charmes defined his crazy writing assembly, clearly emerges as the most crucial thing in his life.

I found the book cover excellent and perfectly fit, with this dandy figure seemingly strolling amongst imposing orthodox buildings. According to Wikipedia, Charms loved to appear dressed like an English dandy and with a calabash pipe.

On his website, he apologizes for being unable to respond to all the mail he receives. Well, my experience is the opposite. I remember one of our several mail exchanges. In 2013 I asked him for git help, and minutes later, he replied with a custom script he had put together for dealing with that exact problem. Later on, as I was working on a git presentation for Codemotion (I think), I fired a quick email asking permission to feature his script in my session. The green light landed seconds later. Salvatore is the epitome of kindness and helpfulness.

As if his pronounced computer skills were not enough, with his latest sci-fi novel Wohpe (on my reading list), he proves to be endowed with the most diverse capabilities.

Anyway, here’s the antirez & Redis story I mentioned. Worth reading it.

Eroica 2023 was the first in a series of events we’ll run throughout the summer and fall. I’m looking forward to the next ones.

We only publish significant news. To find them we use AI (ChatGPT-4) to read and analyze 1000 top news every day. For each article it estimates magnitude, scale, potential and credibility. Then we combine these estimates to get the final Significance score from 0 to 10. And now the best part: We’ll only send you the news scored 6.5 or higher. Sometimes it’s 5 articles, sometimes 2, sometimes 8. And sometimes — none at all. But one thing is constant — you can be sure that you haven’t missed anything important.

The concept is brilliant and well executed, but I can’t help but feel uncomfortable at the notion of an AI curating news for me. Yet, this is the best use case for LLM/AI I’ve seen until now.

I went into this book knowing very little about the author, Carl Schmitt, and the contents. From the first pages, I considered it a bizarre work, wondering whether a solid basis existed behind some of the assumptions and events narrated. Quoting the back cover of my Italian edition (Adelphi):

In a dazzling interweaving of historical interpretation and political theory, mythography and theology, philosophy and esotericism, the great jurist thus enters a fascinating territory on the borderline between speculation and imagination, where the search for the “elemental” goes “to the threshold of eschatology.” With a few strokes, Schmitt traces millennia of history, unraveling its invisible plot, until he arrives at the decisive event: that “planetary spatial revolution” from which the nomos of modern Europe was born. To then look beyond - and foreshadow, with prophecy, the scenarios of the future world where we will be able to recognize our present.

Land and Sea is an essay written in 1942 by a then-eminent and internationally acclaimed jurist, who convincingly joined the german nazi party in 1933. Historical events in the text are inevitably narrated from an opinionated (and sometimes distorted) point of view. This bizarre work left me unconvinced. I don’t regret reading it, though.

“I started realizing that religion shows up in the natural sciences and the contemporary world in a funny and alarming way,” Rubenstein said. “Because sciences tend to think of themselves as something as far away as possible from religion, as having freed themselves from God. To an extent that’s true. But in the process, they tend to generate these big stories, big mythologies, about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. I started tracking the way that the natural sciences themselves generate new ways of understanding the world that, a couple centuries ago, we would have called religion.”

More here.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

I found this Cicero quote on Lapham’s Quarterly’s about page. A little research dug out the supposedly original version found in Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 BC). It goes like this:

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

The style varies according to the piece (and its author); some will inevitably be more fluent than others. Fundamental is the introductory essay by Le Goff himself, which provides a useful general overview of the work and also clarifies its stylistic choices. The Monk essay was crucial to me, as it surfaced abbeys and monasteries’ relevance and incredible influence on medieval society.

Medieval Callings’ innovative approach offers a valuable and intriguing perspective on the complex social dynamics of feudal Europe. The work shows signs of age, having passed more than 30 years since its publication. There are probably newer, modern studies that improve on these texts, but it still serves as a fundamental resource for uneducated readers such as myself.

But what Sun Ra had done, and done best, was reminding earthlings everywhere that he wasn’t mortal. He was a signifier of a life beyond the reality of this one. He was a visual reassurance of the presence of another world. He brought the cosmos to the streets, and, most importantly, he was a reminder that one does not have to subscribe to the status quo—musically, stylistically, politically, ideologically.

More here.

This morning, these memories were brought back to me while reading The End of Computer Magazines in America by Harry McCracken. He was involved with the computer magazine industry in its golden age, so the article has exciting insights. I also appreciated the several former colleagues and competitors who commented, helping frame the period. Computer magazines are dead indeed, and it’s a bittersweet sensation. Quoting McCracken’s closing words:

I do remain grateful that computer magazines existed. Their time has passed—but what a time it was.

However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

More here.

First, The Parable of the Two Watchmakers, introduced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, describes the complex relationship between sub-systems and their larger wholes. In the context of the article, it helps explain, even for non-programmers, the cost of an interruption. It also hints at a possible mitigation technique:

There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who made very fine watches. The phones in their workshops rang frequently and new customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered while Tempus became poorer and poorer. In the end, Tempus lost his shop. What was the reason behind this?

The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. The watches that Tempus made were designed such that, when he had to put down a partly assembled watch, it immediately fell into pieces and had to be reassembled from the basic elements. Hora had designed his watches so that he could put together sub-assemblies of about ten components each, and each sub-assembly could be put down without falling apart. Ten of these sub-assemblies could be put together to make a larger sub-assembly, and ten of the larger sub-assemblies constituted the whole watch.

Second, larger computer screens help a programmer keep his mental model (and context) together. I’m still deciding on this one. Focusing on a single window or not having a lot of cruft around the screen helps solve complex code for me. But toss anything John Carmack at me, and I will abide.

The 640 x 480 resolution was the standard from 1990 to around 1996, but it was possible to get more screen real estate back then. There is a famous photo of John Carmack working on Quake using a 28-inch 1080p monitor in 1995.

Why did he choose 45 kg monitor for about $10k in 1995? The higher screen real estate allowed for more code to be visible at once, resulting in a more dense context. Productivity greatly increases when you have the ability to store and access more detailed context. It’s like having a larger desk to hold documents when studying for an exam or doing any task that requires the use of multiple sources of information from a common domain, such as solving puzzles.

The brilliant comic that opens the article is the perfect TL;DR for the Watchmakers parable.

Last month one of our journalists received an interesting email. A researcher had come across mention of a Guardian article, written by the journalist on a specific subject from a few years before. But the piece was proving elusive on our website and in search. Had the headline perhaps been changed since it was launched? Had it been removed intentionally from the website because of a problem we’d identified? Or had we been forced to take it down by the subject of the piece through legal means?

The reporter couldn’t remember writing the specific piece, but the headline certainly sounded like something they would have written. It was a subject they were identified with and had a record of covering. Worried that there may have been some mistake at our end, they asked colleagues to go back through our systems to track it down. Despite the detailed records we keep of all our content, and especially around deletions or legal issues, they could find no trace of its existence.

Why? Because it had never been written.

More here.

This release refines how the one-cent tolerance is accounted for in validation checks of types 00421 and 00423. As is often the case, there are subtle differences between the theoretical implementation defined in the official specs and the actual validation implemented by the same Agency that released said specs. See the relevant ticket for the details.

The tension of the stakeouts, the contemplation of the woods in the long waits, the excitement of a trail to follow, the scents and sounds of a wilderness where everyone is alone in front of himself: Being Wolf tells of a predator in harmony with his world and of the human who, inspired by it, questions and rethinks his place in nature. I found two other themes well addressed: the hate and malice that often lurk beneath the surface of small, seemingly idyllic communities and the comfort and serenity that a relationship of mutual trust, respect and love offers to aged partners who stubbornly insist on loving and respect each other despite adversity, misunderstanding and betrayal.

This novel has yet to see an English edition, so as for the English title, I made it up from Essere Lupo of the Italian edition. These quick notes offer me a chance to express my gratitude to Iperborea for their incredible work in publishing so many exceptionally translated Northen-Europe works over the years.

I feel like the transcript speaks for itself, but before reproducing it I will state for the historical record that my mind is still exploding from from all the inevitable innovation and legal controversies this kind of usage of LLM (Large Language Model) technologies will provoke in the coming months and years. Software development for this kind of use case will never be the same again.

The whole gaming session’s transcript is available here.

Info and signup here.

Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people – many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don’t over-focus on the specifics of the tools.

I have often fallen into the over-focusing trap in my career. The whole thread is well worth reading:

(via)

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

My Invisible Cities review is available here.

No Sleep Till Shengal recounts the author’s return to Iraq, this time to visit the Yazidi community of Shengal and document their living conditions and struggle as they are threatened by international tensions and protected by Kurdish militias. No Sleep Till Shengal is a good book. Like his predecessor, it is humorous yet tense and touching. I felt like something was amiss in this work, though, and I am not exactly sure what. There are a couple of repetitive passages, perhaps a sign that the author needed to fill in the blanks, having less fresh content at hand. Maybe there’s a slight Deja Vu sensation induced by the previous work; I don’t know. No Sleep is a solid second work on an already visited theme. My affection for Zerocalcare is intact, but I’d pick Kobane Calling over No Sleep, especially for a first reading of this author.

Drawing from my experience doing the whole thing in production, I’ll essentially be live testing a Blazor app, then take the entire thing to remote CI via GitHub Actions. In the process, I’ll show some of the issues we faced, share how we solved them, and offer some practices we adopted.

WebDay 2023 will be a hybrid event, with over 380 in-person attendees and almost 1300 registered for live streaming. After the exhilarating experience of being back on an actual stage at WPC a few months ago, I’m excited to speak once again in front of a real crowd.

Neovim trouble with C# and OmniSharp

When I upgraded my old-ish Neovim (I am using nightly builds now), I started getting a weird error on every .cs file I loaded:

Error executing vim.schedule lua callbaack: /usr/share/[...]/semantic_tokens.lua:342:E5248: Invalid character in group name.

A little investigation revealed that semantic tokens provided by OmniSharp don’t conform to the LSP specification, which triggers the error. I cloned the omnisharp-roslyn repo and dug into the code hoping I could offer a quick fix. As it turns out, however, the issue is actually with Roslyn itself, not OmniSharp. There are tickets on both the Neovim and the OmniSharp repositories, but I fear they’ll stagnate there as non-relevant (note to self: maybe report the problem to the Roslyn folks? Alternatively, propose a patched semantic provider to the omnisharp-roslyn maintainers.)

Anyway, a quick, hacky, and not future-proof fix is to customize Neovim (LazyVim) configuration like this:

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/omnisharp.lua (create if needed)
return {
  "OmniSharp/omnisharp-vim",
  init = function()
    require("lazyvim.util").on_attach(function(client, _)
      if client.name == "omnisharp" then
        client.server_capabilities.semanticTokensProvider = {
          full = vim.empty_dict(),
          legend = {
            tokenModifiers = { "static_symbol" },
            tokenTypes = {
              "comment",
              "excluded_code",
              "identifier",
              "keyword",
              "keyword_control",
              "number",
              "operator",
              "operator_overloaded",
              "preprocessor_keyword",
              "string",
              "whitespace",
              "text",
              "static_symbol",
              "preprocessor_text",
              "punctuation",
              "string_verbatim",
              "string_escape_character",
              "class_name",
              "delegate_name",
              "enum_name",
              "interface_name",
              "module_name",
              "struct_name",
              "type_parameter_name",
              "field_name",
              "enum_member_name",
              "constant_name",
              "local_name",
              "parameter_name",
              "method_name",
              "extension_method_name",
              "property_name",
              "event_name",
              "namespace_name",
              "label_name",
              "xml_doc_comment_attribute_name",
              "xml_doc_comment_attribute_quotes",
              "xml_doc_comment_attribute_value",
              "xml_doc_comment_cdata_section",
              "xml_doc_comment_comment",
              "xml_doc_comment_delimiter",
              "xml_doc_comment_entity_reference",
              "xml_doc_comment_name",
              "xml_doc_comment_processing_instruction",
              "xml_doc_comment_text",
              "xml_literal_attribute_name",
              "xml_literal_attribute_quotes",
              "xml_literal_attribute_value",
              "xml_literal_cdata_section",
              "xml_literal_comment",
              "xml_literal_delimiter",
              "xml_literal_embedded_expression",
              "xml_literal_entity_reference",
              "xml_literal_name",
              "xml_literal_processing_instruction",
              "xml_literal_text",
              "regex_comment",
              "regex_character_class",
              "regex_anchor",
              "regex_quantifier",
              "regex_grouping",
              "regex_alternation",
              "regex_text",
              "regex_self_escaped_character",
              "regex_other_escape",
            },
          },
          range = true,
        }
      end
    end)
  end,
}

It overrides the on_attach event to pass an LSP-digestible list of semantic tokens. And voilà, C# files are now loaded seamlessly.

I’m not done yet. I’m having another weird issue with .editorconfig files. I’m still triaging it, and will report back when (if) I sort it out.

An incredible amount of research went into this book, and it shows. Still, there’s never an overabundance of scientific or nerdy details; quite the contrary, to be honest, and, at least to me, this is one of the book’s weaknesses. It’s astonishing how pivotal moments in establishing the first human colony on the Red Planet are glossed over. One hundred of Earth’s best scientists travel to Mars to create the first human settlement. During their richly narrated, almost two-year-long voyage, we get to know the main characters and learn the ins and outs of the first colonial spaceship. Yet, when they finally reach the orbit, the reader is left with no clues on the undoubtedly dramatic first landing. The settlement is already established in the next chapter, with a second one already in place on Phobos’ surface.

Omitting details such as the first landing is undoubtedly an editorial choice. Given the time scope of the narrated adventure (by the end of the trilogy, it will span a few centuries), it probably makes sense, but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed in some way. The story is more about how humans could establish a society and cultural identity in a remote colony, how such a community develops over time, and, more importantly, how and why conflicts emerge with the distant home first and within the settlement itself later on. While reading, I often thought, ‘Hey, this all reminds me of the American colonization!’ and then, ‘I wonder how much percolated into S.A. Corey’s The Expanse,’ terraforming and Earth-Mars trouble playing prominent roles in both series. In many ways, and I know I am making enemies now, Red Mars could have served well as a prequel to The Expanse².

One thing I found confusing at first but later came to appreciate is that the story isn’t told from a single person’s perspective. Instead, it sprawls across an extensive cast of characters as it expands over time. Viewpoints shift from one character to another, and people we thought we understood suddenly seem strange and different when seen through someone else’s eyes. The Mars society is messy, very human, and often petty, with few clear answers and no simple solutions. In Red Mars, we don’t get an optimistic portrayal of the future of human society. Here, Star Trek’s pacified civilization and the idealistic United Federation of Planets are far away to come, if ever.

Overall, I liked this book, probably a lot, but I don’t think I will read the next installments in the series, at least not right away. Maybe in a while, when Mars dust has settled.

What I did not know until the other day, however, is that Matsumoto worked with Daft Punk. In 2001, the artist and his studio produced all the videos for Daft Punk’s Discovery album. I distinctly remember watching the One More Time video and being blown away. It was fantastic and also fascinating in a strange way, but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Now I understand. I didn’t make the connection back then, but Matsumoto’s touch immediately drew me back to my childhood fantasies, themselves sprouting from the artist’s animes.

In 2003, Toei Animation released Interstella 5555, an “animated musical science fiction film” and a visual companion to the Discovery album. It has no dialogue, minimal sound effects, and all (most?) of Discovery’s music. I watched it this morning and loved every moment of it.

independent, in-person developer conferences are hurting. Based on my own observation as well as talks with organizers and sponsors that I have come to know over the years, the average independent in-person event is still down 30-40% from pre-pandemic attendance levels. And often it seems to require massive discounts or even giveaways to get to this level.

And he offers an interesting theory on why that is:

My hypothesis is that we’ve bifurcated the audience somewhat. The folks that were there almost exclusively for the content have decided that they can do so more cheaply and efficiently online via virtual conferences or recordings. The folks that went for the networking as a primary driver, on the other hand, are largely eschewing online events as not fulfilling their needs. […] So ultimately what we are left with is a lower in-person audience and a lower virtual audience.

As a conference speaker and meetup organizer, I noticed that online events saw low attendance during the pandemic, and they still do today. When available, recordings partially compensate, but only in audience terms. The problem is online events are not conferences. ‘Conference’ originates from the late Latin “conferentia,” itself a derivative of “conferre,” a synonym for the collation of “bring together”¹. A conference is a meeting to discuss some topics. The get-together element is missing in online events, and networking is next to impossible (live chats and ‘virtual after-parties’ are just poor palliatives.) In my book, hybrid events are even worse, as live streaming and recordings discourage live attendance (at the DevRomagna meetups, we often get asked if live streaming or recordings will be available, and the answer is no - either we do live streaming - and we sometimes do - or we do an in-person event, but never a mix of the two.)

Going back to Brian’s musings, I think I subscribe to them. I am not sure attendance will ever get back to old numbers. I am afraid a good portion of those who were regulars became disaffected, and gaining their attention back is a hard gamble. YouTube and Twitch, I think, are phenomenal competitors, and the pandemic hiatus threw a ton of fresh new viewers at them.

PS: Coincidentally, we’re running an in-person meetup at DevRomagna today.

Sanguina Ancora (Still Bleeding) is not a biography but a passionate and informative tribute to Dostoevsky. The nonlinear, not literary style works and the continuous back and forth between Dostoevsky’s epic and the author’s own experiences as a scholar and Russian literature enthusiast is probably a good idea as it helps stress the actualness of Dostoevsky’s opus.

However, the continuous jumping in and out of the Russian’s life, though sympathetic at first, gets tedious over time. While immersed in Dostoevsky’s events, it is not always pleasant to be torn away only to end up in the Parma lowlands for a few entertaining anecdotes (that these anecdotes tend to gravitate around the author’s other works adds to the discomfort.)

That aside, the book contains precious information on Dostoevsky’s life, opus, Russian literature and society of the nineteenth century. Some random facts from my reading notes:

• Dostoevsky’s incredible tenacity in the face of early setbacks. The first translation he worked on was aborted near the end, having discovered that the novel had already been translated into Russian from French. The second was published in a Russian magazine but heavily cut and, worse, without attribution. Yet during all this time, he continued unceasingly, tirelessly, fervently, day and night work what would become his first novel, Poor Folk (an immediate hit.)
• Writers in late 19th century Russia were astonishingly important. Tolstoy had founded a kind of religious cult. Young people would gather in the evenings to read Gogol. In those times, in Russia, writers were real stars.
• Russian literature began with Pushkin. Before him, in the eighteenth century, Russians who wrote did so by imitating the French and knew French better than Russian, as did all the Russian nobles and educated people of the time.
• Bulgakov, in The Master and the Margarita¹, has one of his characters say that Dostoevsky is immortal.
• As great as the country is, there are no dialects in Russia. Also, Russian is a spoken language first, and only then a written language (the Russian alphabet has existed only since the 9th century, with Cyril and Methodius.)
• Russians elected a monument to Arina, Pushkin’s nanny who told him fairy tales and made him love the language. She was illiterate.
• Dostoevsky is arrested and sentenced to death for reading a letter aloud and in public. With his comrades in his revolutionary circle, he undergoes a false execution, an experience he will later give to the protagonist of The Idiot. The five minutes the protagonist waits for the shooting is a transcendental experience.
• Lieutenant Frank Columbo, the protagonist of the famous TV show from seventies, is inspired by Porfirij Petrovic, the detective from Crime and Punishment.

I’ve got a lot of notes from this book, which is a good sign. Vasily Rizanov’s memorable quote on Dostoesky’s writing, also reported in the book, is worth mentioning:

The miracle of Dostoevsky’s writing lies in eliminating the distance between the subject (the reader) and the object (the author), by virtue of which he turns out to be the most familiar of all contemporary writers and, perhaps, even of future writers, of all possible writers.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

More here.

This talk will discuss the experience of moving from C# to Go for a video coding project. The pros and cons of using Go, a modern and efficient programming language, and how it compares to other languages will be shown. In addition, the use of FFmpeg, an open-source tool for video encoding, and how it was used to create the video encoder will be discussed. Advice will be given on using Go and Ffmpeg for future projects. Together, the benefits of using these tools for video encoding will be understood.

Like me, Daniel has a C# background, so it will be interesting to see the whys and hows he picked Golang for his video encoding work. I’m curious about his perspective on both languages and what he learned from adopting a new stack. Leaving the safe path to adventure into unknown territory is a safe way to broaden knowledge and improve self-confidence, or at least it was for me when I added Python to my tool belt. In surprising and unexpected ways, most of the new expertise also proved invaluable in my C# & F# work.

The session will be held in person, in Italian. So if you’re interested, join us!

The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again.

Consider the following class:

    public class Person
    {
        public string FirstName { get; init; }
    }

You can initialize it like this:

    var person = new Person { FirstName = "John" };

But this will fail:

    var person = new Person();
    person.FirstName = "John";  //Not allowed

For my project, which is a .NET Standard 2.0 library, I thought this approach might be preferable to a parameter-enforced class constructor alternative.

To my surprise, however, when I tried the above, I got the following error:

The predefined type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.IsExternalInit' must be
defined or imported in order to declare init-only setter

As it turns out, The IsExternalInit type is only included in the net5.0 (and subsequent) target frameworks, so one cannot use it right away in a NetStandard 2.0 (or 2.1, for that matter) library.

In the dotnet world, when I encounter “type is not defined in version X” scenario, I know I can get around the issue by making up the type on my own. A quick lookup confirmed that this was the case, and the workaround is to add the following somewhere in my source code:

    namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices
    {
        internal static class IsExternalInit {}
    }

And presto, the init keyword is now fully available to my library.

While researching this matter, I stumbled into PolySharp, a lovely package that takes this workaround approach to new heights. What is it?

PolySharp provides generated, source-only polyfills for C# language features, to easily use all runtime-agnostic features downlevel. The package is distributed as a source generator, so that it will automatically detect which polyfills are needed depending on the target framework and project in use: just add a reference to PolySharp, set your C# language version to latest, and have fun!

And it works! Just add a PolySharp reference, and almost all modern C# language features become automagically available to your project, with no tricks around polluting your code. What’s also nice about PolySharp, is that it isn’t a dependency for your library; it only needs to be there at compile time.

Do you know what’s funny? After all, I took a different route; no init keyword is used anymore in my library, but that’s for another story.

As it turns out, this is the Flammarion engraving, a famous wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (“The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”).