The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Jim Nielsen: That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. More here.

We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup this month, and I think it will be a super-interesting one. It’s titled Heading to Go: A Look at Building a Video Encoder and the presenter will be Daniel Enrico Botta, a C# software engineer who recently switched to Go for his video encoding projects. Here’s the abstract: This talk will discuss the experience of moving from C# to Go for a video coding project. The pros and cons of using Go, a modern and efficient programming language, and how it compares to other languages will be shown. In addition, the use of FFmpeg, an open-source tool for video encoding, and how it was used to create the video encoder will be discussed. Advice will be given on using Go and Ffmpeg for future projects. Together, the benefits of using these tools for video encoding will be understood. ...

Brad Mehldau plays Lennon/McCartney’s I Am the Walrus, from his upcoming album, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.

In a C# library I’ve been working on, I wanted to use C# 9.0’s init keyword. Quoting the documentation: The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again. Consider the following class: public class Person { public string FirstName { get; init; } } You can initialize it like this: ...

I was reading iA’s grumpy writing about GPT (with which I sympathize) when my attention was captured by the image they added to their post. It was so fascinating that I had to research it. As it turns out, this is the Flammarion engraving, a famous wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (“The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”). ...

Steve Sanderson, the original creator of Blazor, recently posted a quick peek at some of the new Blazor prototypes they are experimenting with for .NET 8. I think this looks great. Mixing client and server is a brilliant concept. Essentially one would be served with server-side Blazor on the first landing. While using the app, a background task would download the client-side stuff, ready to be consumed at any subsequent access. ...

Source Above all, I liked the affection and serenity that shines, through all stages, between father and son. A depiction of the circle of life I gladly subscribe to.

According to the always-interesting Ted Gioia, the recent turnaround of Barnes & Noble is to be attributed to the company’s new CEO and his love of books. Quite astonishingly James Daunt, who took the helm of B&N in late 2019, refused to take promotional money from publishers: Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more impressive, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions. This is James Daunt’s superpower: He loves books. ...

Slow Sunday morning, while surfing the YouTube ocean, I stumbled upon the audio recording of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech. Any DFW fan knows about the commencement speech he famously gave at Kenyon College in 2005, and I’m probably one of the few who hadn’t yet listened to it. So this morning, I hit the play button and was blown away by it. Unsurprisingly, I guess, as the speech was met with universal acclaim. ...