I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others. ...

While it has been a very challenging and difficult time for the company, it cannot even remotely be compared with the horrendous situation that the people of Ukraine are facing on a daily basis, caused by the war. Once again, we condemn this aggression, and have and will continue to stand by the people of Ukraine, including our colleagues and their families. More here. I’m using JetBrains products when I’m not in (neo)vim. For C#, Rider is fantastic, and so is PyCharm for Python. The company is incredible, too, as today’s bold move demonstrates. They moved 800 employees, got visas, new locations and apartments, everything. Huge respect. ...

Despite its name suggesting otherwise, Dune II was a first – a real-time strategy game that sprang out of the box with almost every gameplay attribute and control system seen in every RTS since. In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming. ...

The other day we did a .NET 7 Spotlight event at this month’s DevRomagna meetup. The speakers were Ugo Lattanzi and me. In my session, I chose to talk about my top 7 new features in .NET 7 (pun intended.) What follows is a mix of my preparation notes and what I ended up really saying1. 1. Performance Since the initial release of “new dotnet” (.NET Core), performance has always been a critical goal for the .NET team. Starting with .NET 5, performance gains have been skyrocketing. .NET 6 was a lot faster than 5, and now, well, I’m surprised by the remarkable performance improvements in .NET 7. Stephen Toub posted a remarkably long (255 printed pages!) in-depth analysis of the performance improvements in .NET 7. one That was followed by articles dedicated to ASP.NET Core 7 and MAUI 7 performance gains. At .NETConf 2022, a particular slide caught everyone’s attention. ...

Wrapped by Spotify, the 2022 edition just landed in my mailbox. This year I listened to twenty-four different genres. My favorite was Indie Jazz, followed by Hip Hop, Jazz, Electronica and Rock. I am a little puzzled about that Hip Hop in second place. In total, I spent 14143 minutes listening to music, 80 percent more than other listeners in Italy did. My favorite track was Fear Of The Dawn by Jack White, followed by The Beginning by Native Soul, Sorcery by The Toxic Avenger, Spirals by Django Django, and Boy From Michigan by John Grant. ...

Marcus Hutchins on Mastodon: What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions. More here. I have been on Mastodon for a few weeks now, and wow, what a breath of fresh air. I’m only syndicating to Twitter (and have been for a while, as you might have noticed) while I’m active and engaged on Masto. I know this is breaking my POSSE stance so much that I’ve set up my own Masto instance so I could own my content over there like I do with this website. I never switched from fosstodon (which is an instance I like a lot), though. I’ll wait a little bit and then decide on the move. ...

Masen’ka (or Mary) is Nabokov’s debut novel. It was written when he was in his twenties, living as an émigré in Berlin, just like the story’s protagonist. In the introduction of my Italian edition (Adelphi), the author admits that some life events poured into the narration. The depiction of Ganin’s life in a pension filled with fellow Russian ex-pats, and the relationships between them, is undoubtedly reminiscent of Nabokov’s own experience. ...

Yesterday the creator of the Python language, Guido van Rossum, tweeted about The Origins of Python, an essay by his mentor, Lambert Meertens. “On Sunday, June 21, 1970, in an office building on Great Portland Street in London, a teletype sprang to life. Under the heading “HAPPY FAMILIES,” the machine rattled out a sequence of English sentences, such as “THE DOG SITS ON THE BABY” and “UNCLE TED PLAYS WITH SISTER.” The “Happy Families” program that produced this output had been written that same weekend by someone with no prior programming experience, a participant in a workshop organized by the Computer Arts Society offering a course in “non-numerical programming.” ...

The Crow Comes Last is a collection of thirty short stories written between 1945 and 1948, primarily based on the author’s wartime experiences as a resistance fighter during WWII and then in postwar Italy. Some are brutal, others funny, and some are gritty. They all revolve around the themes he perfectly defined while talking about his book: I prefer to divide the subject into three parts, to highlight three thematic lines of my work from those years. The first is the ‘Resistance’ story (or at any rate of war or violence), seen as an adventure of suspense or terror, a type of fiction that quite a few of us did at that time. The second line is also common to much fiction of those years and is the postwar picaresque tale, stories coloured by elemental characters and appetites. In the third, the landscape of the Riviera dominates, with boys or teenagers and animals. This last line is a personal development of a ’literature of memory. Needless to say, the three lines often. ...

There’s regular hiking, and then there’s Antarctica hiking. Check out brr’s report of a Sunday’s hike from McMurdo’s base up to the tip of Castle Rock, with spectacular views of Mount Erebus and the surroundings. brr’s Antarticta blog is a recent addition to my RSS feed collection. It’s always interesting to follow people living and working in the most remote parts of the world.