Posts

Pitchfork has a great piece on Sun Ra and his legacy. It’s worth reading if you’re a fan, even more so if you know nothing about him. But what Sun Ra had done, and done best, was reminding earthlings everywhere that he wasn’t mortal. He was a signifier of a life beyond the reality of this one. He was a visual reassurance of the presence of another world. He brought the cosmos to the streets, and, most importantly, he was a reminder that one does not have to subscribe to the status quo—musically, stylistically, politically, ideologically....

In the mid-to-late 80s, my excitement used to culminate by the end of the month when BYTE’s new issue would hit the newsstands1. In my small Italian hometown, only one, sometimes two, newsstands would sometime get a copy (BYTE was published in the US and copies sent abroad were scarce; only major, close-to-the-train-station stands had a chance to receive it). I wasn’t the only kid in town interested in that elusive one issue; I had an anonymous competitor....

Noam Chomsky’s essays are always worth reading, no matter the topic he decides to address, because, well, frankly, he’s one of the brightest and most well-informed minds of our time. His criticism of OpenAI’s ChatGPT makes no exception. It does an excellent job of explaining how LLMs work, the differences with human reasoning, and why, in his opinion, the advent of artificial general intelligence is a long way to go, if ever....

I’m just back from reading Programmer Interrupted: The Real Cost of Interruption and Context Switching, an interesting short piece in which I learned about at least two new things. First, The Parable of the Two Watchmakers, introduced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, describes the complex relationship between sub-systems and their larger wholes. In the context of the article, it helps explain, even for non-programmers, the cost of an interruption. It also hints at a possible mitigation technique:...

Chris Moran, the Guardian’s head of editorial innovation: Last month one of our journalists received an interesting email. A researcher had come across mention of a Guardian article, written by the journalist on a specific subject from a few years before. But the piece was proving elusive on our website and in search. Had the headline perhaps been changed since it was launched? Had it been removed intentionally from the website because of a problem we’d identified?...

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.7 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the canon defined by the Italian Revenue Agency. This release refines how the one-cent tolerance is accounted for in validation checks of types 00421 and 00423. As is often the case, there are subtle differences between the theoretical implementation defined in the official specs and the actual validation implemented by the same Agency that released said specs....

I saw a wolf: that’s the phrase Ulf, a hunter and former forestry inspector now in his seventies, has been brooding, unable to confess to anyone since he spotted a majestic specimen at dawn on the first day of the year. Something clicks inside him, and Ulf, one of the most respected men in the village in deep Sweden where he lives, feels an increasingly solid and intimate connection with the creature....

A dad reunites with his three kids, ages 26, 23 and 15, and they decide to do a D&D campaign together. Now, this alone would be enough to catch my attention: I’ve been an avid D&D player as a boy, my older son has been playing too, and I always dreamed of playing one day with my three kids and maybe my wife. But there’s more to this story. Tenzin, the youngest son and long-time tabletop RPG gamer and DM, proposes to let OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 be their DM....

Steve Sanderson is experimenting again, and when Steve plays with his toys, I pay attention. In a new video on his YouTube channel, Steve introduces an experimental new .NET package that allows the creation of isolated instances of the .NET runtime that will safely run code in a sandbox.

I know this is coming in a bit late; apologies, but… We’re doing a Web Performance meetup at DevRomagna today. Andrea ‘Verlok’ Verlicchi, a Google Developer Expert specialing in web performance, will share his extensive experience in web performance and provide practical, high-impact, and easily applicable tips on improving performance in 2023. Info and signup here.