It’s now old news that the James Webb Telescope was successfully launched on Christmas Day. But last Saturday marked another historic moment for this incredible human artifact: After a quarter-century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments, and, by God, the process went smoothly. ...

An excellent article on Web3 has just appeared on Moxie Marlinspike’s website. Being Moxie1, he’s not just speculating and rambling about stuff. In an attempt to learn more about the so-called Web3 and the technologies around it, he went all-in and built a couple of dApps himself. Then, he produced an NFT and put it up for sale. What he found is, well, to put it mildly, fascinating. Some of his insights on technology are also interesting. For example, on distributed vs. centralized systems: ...

Over the years, Iperborea, one of my favorite Italian publishers, has been publishing an unofficial Nordic Tales series. Their renowned nordic fiction series includes one fairy tale volume per year, usually published in December, just for Christmas. The first book was Lapland Tales in 2014, and then they continued with Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Faroe, Norwegian, Greenlandic and then Finnish in 2021. I’ve been greedily reading each one of them, usually as my last book of the year. This year I was a little bit late, as reported. ...

This year I’ve read twenty-one books or 5903 pages. That’s fewer books than last year (28 / 8064), the year before (25 / 8394), and the one before that (30 / 8447). Heck, I must look back at 2014 to score a win in my very own yearly reading challenge. What surprises me is not much the number of books but the pages I read, which constitutes a more relevant metric. Over the previous three years, that number stayed firmly over 8k while dropping to 6k this year. ...

I found a Consider the Lobster review on Goodreads that almost precisely matches my thoughts on DFW and the book. Hence, given the lazy Christmas-break mood I am in right now, I am conceding myself the right to copy-paste and edit David’s review right away. I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently as DFW. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing – it’s also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell ‘footnote’?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is outstanding, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. ...

When The Digital Antiquarian released his System Shock retrospective earlier this year, I was in awe. System Shock was one of my favorite games back in the day, and yes, in the quarrel between id Software’s DOOM and Looking Glass’s System Shock, I was siding with the latter. I was so much more for immersion and storyline than shoot ’em-ups. The Antiquarian article is excellent. If you’re into gaming history or, really, into computer’s history, I urge you to read it all. ...

I’m not a regular philosophy reader, much less of self-improvement guides. I’m wary of the latter and too ignorant for the former. Yet, theologian Vito Mancuso has intrigued me for some time. I followed his podcast on the “Four Masters of Life”1 and found it excellent. In it, Mancuso discusses his four tutelary deities: “Socrates, the educator. Buddha, the physician. Confucius, the politician. Jesus, the prophet.” I also listened to some TV interviews where I always found him fascinating. In short, there was enough to make me decide to read some of his work. From the back cover of the book: ...

This weekend assignment was to upgrade a couple of old Windows 10 VMs to Windows 11 in Parallels Desktop 17. I couldn’t do that right away because Windows Update was complaining about the lack of the TPM chip. A little research revealed that TPM chips only work on UEFI BIOS. To check which BIOS version was being used in my VMs, I used the msinfo32 (System Information) application. It showed the BIOS to be of “Legacy” type. So my task was now to switch it to UEFI. ...

After five years in Oracle’s MySQL team, Steinar H. Gunderson resigned a few days ago. On the same day, he dropped the bomb on his blog: let me point out something that I’ve been saying both internally and externally for the last five years (although never on a stage—which explains why I’ve been staying away from stages talking about MySQL): MySQL is a pretty poor database, and you should strongly consider using Postgres instead1. ...

Space-junkie me is back, this time reading about the innumerable opportunities that SpaceX’s Starship will offer once it becomes operational, hopefully no later than this year or the next. In his Science Upside for Starship, the exceptionally knowledgeable Casey Handmer makes a case for Starship relevance in the future of space exploration by listing an astounding number of reasonable use-cases for the vessel. I think it is relatively straightforward to think of cool things to do with SpaceX Starships, so recent posts have focused on trying to understand the more mixed consequences for incumbent industrial organizations that are not ideally positioned to exploit the coming advances. It is, however, a fun exercise to enumerate all the ways in which Starship and related technologies can help execute bold, ambitious missions of scientific discovery. ...