Posts

We watched A Private Life in the theatre yesterday, a fine, funny and intriguing French film set in Paris with a solid Jodie Foster as protagonist. But I’m here for the closing piece of the soundtrack, the one you hear over the end credits: Don’t Go To Strangers, by JJ Cale. I immediately reached for Shazam while Serena looked it up on Spotify. Now I’m spending this whole Sunday morning listening and reading about the artist and the Tulsa sound movement he originated. Despite his reticence and all-around low profile, he was no small feat and inspired many a great artist in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Just to get your bearings, he’s the original author of Cocaine later brought to fame by Eric Clapton. ...

I reluctantly admit that it was Spotify’s Discover Weekly that let me discover Flea’s new solo single, A Plea. It’s jazz, and it’s beautiful. There are echoes of Fela Kuti and Sun Ra in it or, well, that was my first thought. The lyrics may sound naive at first, but they’re not. Instead, they strike me as lucid and match my general feeling about what’s going on lately, the risks we’re taking as a society, and what we should do to move beyond and improve ourselves. The video is 100% Flea, and it’s adorable (it is directed by his daughter). ...

AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor. The mistake people make is conflating the task with the role. It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part. AI is doing something similar for us. ...

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. ...