Last night, I was preparing dinner while waiting for Serena to return home when I received an unexpected call from her: she was in her parked car, petrified as the car’s headlights had illuminated a person lying on the floor of our building’s entrance, right in front of the elevator1. I told her to stay in the car and rushed down the stairs. When I got to the ground floor, no one was there; I checked the basement, and it was empty, too. On my way back, I found Serena entering from the front door. She told me the person had quickly risen and walked away when the lights turned on in the staircase. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Today I released Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.13. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by Italian Revenue Agency (Agenzia Entrate). See the changelog for details (Italian).

We watched Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron yesterday at the theatre, and I liked it. The official plot goes like this: 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. ...

Professor Ethan Mollick’s Signs and Portents analyzes what AI has achieved, what the effects have been so far, and what we might expect in 2024. 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. ...

Another achievement I unlocked with the recent website update is the newsletter switch from Substack to a fantastic and independent provider, Buttondown. That required updating all the “subscribe to my newsletter” links. We’re talking 5K posts, all saved as individual files in the same directory. The bash command that did that for me is: 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. ...

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. ...

During the Christmas/New Year break, I achieved my goal of updating my website with a new theme. I loved Casper, the previous one I ran for a very long time, but it has not been updated in years and looks abandoned. I wanted new features like fuzzy search, archive and tags pages, cover images, table of contents, title anchors, and more. Also, the old theme kept me anchored to an ancient Hugo version, something I felt uncomfortable with. There are still a few loose parts, but I’m confident I made the right call by switching to PaperMod; it offers all the needed features (and plenty more), and it’s frequently updated, which allows me to open tickets and offer improvements confidently. ...

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