Another day another Homebrew incompatibility emerges, this time with docfx, the technical documentation building tool of reference in .NET space. I’ve been using docfx for years to build the FatturaElettronica.NET website, and it’s always been working without a glitch. Lately, however, my builds have been failing with strange errors I was too lazy to diagnose until today when I decided to grasp the nettle and sort the whole thing out. 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. ...

Today I learned that .NET 8 Preview could play better with Homebrew (or vice-versa). I’m working on a C# 12 presentation for our local developer meetup, and for that, I wanted .NET 8 Preview to run side by side with version 7 on my Mac. As version 7 was initially installed with Homebrew, I also wanted to install version 8 Preview with Homebrew, but that recipe was unavailable. Not perfectly happy with that, I fell back to the stand-alone installer, expecting problems. ...

I have been working on a side project for which I’m using bpython, a “fancy interface to the Python interpreter.” If you use the Python REPL often, you should check it out. It offers unique features like in-line syntax highlighting, readline-like autocomplete, a “rewind” function to pop the last line of code from memory, auto-indentation and more. Anyway, today I found a bug in bpython, and that’s that Python’s decimal.getcontext() does not work with it. ...

Julian Casablancas (The Strokes, The Voidz) says Infinity Repeating is “the last Daft Punk song, ever.” The song was recorded in 2013 as a demo and left unpublished until it was included in the 10th-anniversary edition of Random Access Memories released a few weeks ago. The video is a highly addictive masterpiece. Digging into the comments on YouTube, I found that someone attempted a reconstruction of all the citations included. I’m especially fond of the 8-16-32-bit graphics animation section. Another thing I learned is that Thomas Bangalter, formerly one-half of Daft Punk, said that his fear of artificial intelligence was a factor in why the group split in 2021. ...

Donald Knuth challenged ChatGPT-4 with 20 questions and then submitted the results and his comments to Stephen Wolfram. The whole thing is fascinating in many ways and worth reading. 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. ...

The latest .NET 8 Preview is out, and I love that they’re finally changing how MSBuild logs are printed to the terminal. The new Terminal Logger ditches the infamous “wall of text” that is a nightmare to parse in favor of a cleaner, leaner, and more organized output. 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. ...

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. ...

Adorable, functional, often internet-connected desktop bots like those below are hand-crafted by Mohit Bhoite in San Francisco, California. 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).

Today I learned about a precious little macOS command line tool, networkQuality. 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. ...

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. 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. ...