I’m abandoning Twitter/X. I’ll freeze the account without deleting it; never say never, but I don’t plan on coming back. I no longer feel comfortable on that platform and haven’t been for a while. If you still want to follow me (I’d love for you to do so), the best option is my website where I always post first (RSS feed here), the mailing list, or Mastodon.

We spent a weekend in Venice1 a short while ago, and one of the things that caught my attention was the wells in the city’s squares. Is there fresh water underneath that brackish swamp water? Well, no. The water from the wells in Venice is rainwater, collected by an ingenious hydraulic collection system that leveraged the square and surrounding buildings. I learned this and other intriguing tidbits by watching The Crazy Engineering of Venice on YouTube....

Quoting Bryan Baun: Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body. Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

Rand Fishkin on the evolution of digital marketing: Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last twenty years is ending. I’m serious. I believe that Rand in 2010 would have told you that digital marketing was all about being able to track every view and every click, so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them, is wrong today. Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics....

I dig the attempt at a Solarpunk Manifesto. Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian....

Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. – David Foster Wallace

I left home at 5 AM on my Triumph Bonneville, arrived in Palafavera at about 9 AM, and left on foot half an hour later. I was eager to see the Civetta’s northwest face again, and it was as I remembered it: giant, looming, impressive, intimidating, outstanding. As I crossed the valley below, I thought about Marco Anghilleri, who completed the first winter repeat of the Solleder route on that wall, and just then, I came across a plaque, just below the summit’s vertical, announcing his passing on the Central Freney Pylon in 2014....

Today I learned about ShellCheck, a static analysis tool that “finds bugs in your scripts”. It can and should be run on the command line, but an online version is also available. It catches most style and syntax errors and has plenty of options, like ignoring specific errors and warnings, which is helpful in CI scenarios.

Bash-Oneliner is an excellent resource for Bash/Linux users. Most of the “tricks” are well-known, but there is always something to learn. More importantly, finding them all well organized in one file is rare. I use the reverse lookup of bash-history (Ctrl+R) daily. Still, only today (thanks to an HN comment on Bash-Onliner) did I learn that it also preserves one’s comments, which can be exploited to invoke complex commands quickly:...

The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos. Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the power outlet....