I read a well-researched story about Redis and its creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as antirez. I was already familiar with many details as I have been following him since OKNotizie and Segnalo, of which I was a user. At the time, as a user, I exchanged a few emails with Salvatore, whom years later I had the pleasure of meeting in person, as we were both speakers at several conferences. ...

Last weekend I attended Eroica 2023, a motorcycling event organized by the Italian branch of the Triumph Owners Motorcycle Club I currently preside. We rode the Eroica route, a legendary gravel bicycle race that runs through the most beautiful territories of the Tuscan Chianti region. It was glorious. The weather was perfect, the food was incredible, and the close-knit party of thirty T.O.M.C.C. bikers had great fun. We all ended up covered in an astonishing amount of powder. ...

Minimalist News is the first LLM project that excites me but in a nervous way. Quoting the About page: 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. ...

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.8 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards. As with the previous one, this release also addresses a small undocumented behavior in validating the invoice. See the relevant ticket for the details.

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. 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): ...

A fascinating article surfaced on Nautilus last week. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and science in society at Wesleyan University, shares her concerns about the technical strides and aspirations of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company’s mission to enable thousands of people to live on Mars, and the ethics of terraforming the planet to be more like Earth. What’s intriguing, though, is Rubenstein’s thoughts about the religious underpinnings of the United States space program and how even modern science is still hostage to imperialistic Christian ideas. ...

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? ...

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. ...

Pitchfork has a great piece on Sun Ra and his legacy. It’s worth reading if you’re a fan, even more so if you know nothing about him. 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. ...

In the mid-to-late 80s, my excitement used to culminate by the end of the month when BYTE’s new issue would hit the newsstands1. In my small Italian hometown, only one, sometimes two, newsstands would sometime get a copy (BYTE was published in the US and copies sent abroad were scarce; only major, close-to-the-train-station stands had a chance to receive it). I wasn’t the only kid in town interested in that elusive one issue; I had an anonymous competitor. The race was on every third week of the month, give or take. You see, the thing is, back then, computer magazines were the only source of reliable, precious information on everything hardware and software. I could barely read English at that age. Yet, I spent whole afternoons stubbornly reading the magazine cover to cover, probably understanding only fifty percent of its content. Rather than at school, I learned most of my English by reading computer magazines. ...