I swear it’s not an impressionist painting, just a blurry photo I took yesterday during my forest walk. The deer were watching me from the edge of the woods, not far away. The moment lasted a long time, until I ruined it by pulling out my phone. At that point, they took flight. If you’re reading from the RSS feed or the newsletter, click here to see the actual image.
If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought. – Daniel Lemire, Why Speed Matters.
For most of humankind, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every individual on the face of the earth has not existed. This designation stops at the border of a tribe or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village. — Paraphrased from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, 1952 (full quote and context) I guess my beloved Star Trek future—post-scarcity, post-conflict, beyond divisions—is still far away. ...
On Wednesday, I held a session titled “Feature Flags and Dynamic Configurations in C#” at WPC 2025. It went well, at least judging by the offline questions that came in at the end of the session and which almost made us late for lunch. Attending WPC is always exciting. The audience is large, the rooms are big and well-equipped, the energy is just right, and there’s always a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues. I especially enjoy seeing fellow Microsoft MVPs and speakers. ...
The woods, the jungle, the forest are the boundary between the wild and the civilized, a place of shelter and legendary fears, of hiding and losing oneself. A place of wonder and unease. [..] But what a mythical power lies in this tangle of nature, shadows, and roots, where the unconscious of the world can be found. – Vinicio Capossela
Eve v2.2.4 was just released on PyPI. It is a minor update, with a validation fix contributed by smeng9. See the changelog for details.
Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself. ...
I think of it [the usefulness of writing] like breathing but for ideas. We do so much reading all day—there should be a natural balance with producing words too. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale… Joe Boudreau in On 10 Years of Writing a Blog Nobody Reads, an article I agree 100% with.
I presented a session at the .NET Conference Italia 2025 in Milan a couple of weeks ago. The title was “Integrating our applications with LLMs and AI via MCP Servers”. It was well received; there were good questions throughout the talk and in the hall afterward. Surprisingly, live coding and demos went relatively smoothly. The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case someone is interested. Yeah, it is in Italian. I got a transcript from MacWhisper and then asked Claude to translate and clean it up. It did a pretty good job, so let me know if there’s any interest in an English transcript; I might post it here. ...
If you want to understand time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, and smooth even the sharpest edge. ...