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. 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. ...

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. Colin seems a lovable, down-to-earth guy, I like his attitude. Oh, and I would’ve bailed much sooner than him. ...

Yesterday’s OpenAI launch of Sora is, as is always the case with OpenAI, mind-boggling. Marquees Browniee’s comment is spot-on, so much so as he’s obviously involved in the video-making scene. 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. ...

I’m always fascinated by these in-depth bibliography efforts, and this one, with its unique 300-page catalog detailing 7,400 titles from Charles Darwin’s library, is nothing short of extraordinary. 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.” ...

Technically, The New Yorker’s Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times reviews a book on Spinoza. It is so well conceived that it also offers a practical primer on the philosopher’s thoughts on God, nature, democracy, religion and their interaction. 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. ...

Today I learned that GitHub wikis are not editable online and do not support pull requests. You can clone and edit a wiki locally but not return your change to the original repository. 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. ...

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. ...

Ethan Mollick, one of my few LLM/AI sources, just dropped his first impressions on Gemini Advanced, released today, but which he’s been testing for a month in early access. 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. ...

After yesterday’s, another article on the modern era of blogging surfaced on my RSS feed. In A Golden Era of Blogging, Jim Nielsen boldly proposes that we live in, you guessed it, a new golden era of blogging. 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. ...