Jordan Mechner (@jmechner, creator of Prince of Persia) has written and drawn a graphic novel memoir, REPLAY. It’s out in French and will be released in English on March 19. I pre-ordered a signed English copy. More info here.

“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)....

In a brigh Sunday morning, we went on a lonely beach walk Our third kid turned eighteen yesterday; she’s an adult now, and we’re left with no teenagers in our family. She is on a celebrative short trip to Barcelona so we are alone at home, for the first time. It’s only temporary, but it’ll become the norm in just over a year when she leaves for University. What a strange feeling; the nest is going to be empty soon....

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....

Today, I learned that SQLite only enforces foreign-key constraints if explicitly instructed. I imagine this is well-known and trivial for the SQLite initiated, but we’re a Postgres shop; I have used SQLite sporadically, primarily for experiments like today’s, and this one amenity was certainly unexpected. 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....

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....

Today, I learned the hard way that the default port for ASP.NET Core 8 container images has been updated from port 80 to 8080, quite a remarkable breaking change. 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....

Yesterday, I went on a hiking trip to Monte Tiravento. This majestic loop tour is uncommon compared to the classic woody image of the Parco Nazionale del Foreste Casentinesi, as it takes place mainly on aerial and partly even barren ridges, resulting in magnificent views. Compared to other variants I did in the past, this one starts at a high altitude, offering lower elevation differences. 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....

From my experience as a maintainer of midly successful open-source projects, I have come to the conclusion that people who criticize accepting payment to work on such projects are either acting in bad faith or are incredibly naive. 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....

My mountaineering days are mostly left behind, and I miss them, so now and then, I look at some YouTube videos from the field specialists. Today, the algorithm suggested I watch a truly phenomenal one by Colin Haley. 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....