I read 30 books or 8365 pages in 2024, a solid improvement over last year’s, and many of those books were excellent. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was outstanding, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was incredible, and then there’s Family Lexicon and The garden of Finzi-Contini, and many others were close to that league. Yeah, color me satisfied. The usual scoring system applies: One star means a book is meh. Two stars mean a book is perfectly fine. Three stars mean a book is good—consider it recommended. Four stars mean a book is exceptional. Five stars is pretty much unheard of. The question of Palestine, by E.W. Said (La Questione Palestinese, il Saggiatore) ...

I sat to jot down a quick introduction to my C# 13 What’s New and Interesting session next week, and what I ended up with instead is a long rant or, should I dare, stream of consciousness that is certainly inappropriate for a five-minute introduction. I’ll have to cut most of it down, especially on the personal story part, but my site might be a good place to host it in all its completeness. I may reference this post at the start of the session on Monday for those few poor souls who might be interested. ...

I’m speaking at the .NET Conference Italia 2024 on Dec 16th in Milan at the Microsoft House. My session is titled C# 13 What’s New and Interesting and will be on the latest iteration of the C# language. We’ll also briefly touch on .NET 9, which was also just released. Hope to see you there (make sure to come to me to say Hi!)

Inspired by the historic Dahomey Amazons and founded by three of the biggest powerhouses in African music, Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia, and Oumou Sangare, Les Amazones d’Afrique have been using their voices to advocate for women’s rights since their 2017 debut. The group has never shied away from mashing up tradition and technology. Still, on Musow Dance, with the endlessly inventive production of Jacknife Lee, they lean heavily into an almost entirely electronic sound, turning up the energy several notches with booming 808s, dramatic synth slides, and bursts of vintage disco. But none of these additions ever overshadow the true soul of the music, instead amplifying the already formidable voices of Les Amazones d’Afrique’s ever-evolving lineup (source). ...

I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy1. On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the themes, especially the correlations and connections between the three short novels that comprise the volume. It was an alienating and revealing experience. For the first time, I am reasoning about a book with a machine, not a person. Because it knows everything about the text and draws on the shared global knowledge, it can give more satisfaction than most people do (also, it’s not easy to find someone around with whom I can talk about all the books I read!) Yes, it is wordy and repetitive, but it can stimulate and enrich my analysis2. ...

I took a daily hike in my beloved Apennine Mountains a few weeks ago. One of my favourite motorcycling routes is the narrow, engaging, panoramic road that unites Corniolo in the Bidente Valley with Marradi and the Mugello area via the Braccina Pass. I always wanted to return and hike through it; the moment had come. It was an excellent circular tour that, to the merits of moderation-it is not too long, nor too strenuous, the ascent is always gradual, etc. - also combines the variety of the environment, shading from mixed mid-altitude broadleaf forests (hornbeams, oaks, ash, cherry, maple) to coniferous reforestations that in this case, with increasing age and size, have taken on a certain dignity. ...

A walk on the beach right after the storm. Lots of logs scattered all around, for miles. And sanderlings running all over the place.

Kara Swisher, a dean in digital and classical journalism, has an interesting article in the New York Magazine. As a witness and protagonist she recounts how in the last 30 years digital has eaten away at traditional media and how today, with the advent of AI, there is a risk of it happening all over again. Above all, she reasons why it is essential for journalists not to surrender their weapons and lawmakers to step in and finally harness an industry that always had free reign and no regulation, as it is considered inevitable. ...

Today I released Eve 2.2. It is a maintenance release that drops old Pythons and adds support for the latest versions of the language. Long overdue, it also gets rid of some annoying deprecation warnings. As always, see the changelog for details. Many thanks to Bret Curtis and Guillaume Le Pape for their contributions to this release.

Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print “gimme gimme gimme”, because of the Abba song called “Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight”. Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today. ...