Posts

Donald Knuth challenged ChatGPT-4 with 20 questions and then submitted the results and his comments to Stephen Wolfram. The whole thing is fascinating in many ways and worth reading. Some remarkable quotes: Of course these are extremely impressive responses, sometimes astonishingly so; thus I totally understand why you and others have been paying attention to it. The most immediate impression is the quality of the wordsmithing. It’s way better than 99% of copy that people actually write. It’s definitely not like a Markov model that uses the most predictable way to continue what’s already been said. On the other hand there are surprising lapses there too, as typical of any large system. ...

The latest .NET 8 Preview is out, and I love that they’re finally changing how MSBuild logs are printed to the terminal. The new Terminal Logger ditches the infamous “wall of text” that is a nightmare to parse in favor of a cleaner, leaner, and more organized output. Once enabled, the new logger shows you the restore phase, followed by the build phase. During each phase, the currently-building projects are at the bottom of the terminal, and each building project tells you both the MSBuild Target currently being built, as well as the amount of time spent on that target. ...

Alessandro Barbaglia’s La mossa del matto (The fool’s move) tries to be three things in one: the life story of chess champion Bobby Fischer, a reconciliation dialogue between author and father, who died too soon, as well the tracing of a daring parallel between Fischer’s relationship with Russian champion Boris Spasskij and that of Achilles and Ulysses of Homeric memory. In our neck of the woods, we say that too much is crippling, and this work runs the risk. ...

Adorable, functional, often internet-connected desktop bots like those below are hand-crafted by Mohit Bhoite in San Francisco, California. It pleasantly surprised me that they’re built as a purely artistic expression. All sculptures (as Mohit rightfully refers to them) are unique and not for sale. Check them all out on his website (via).

Today I learned about a precious little macOS command line tool, networkQuality. The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance. Usage: networkQuality -v Example output: ==== SUMMARY ==== Uplink capacity: 44.448 Mbps (Accuracy: High) Downlink capacity: 162.135 Mbps (Accuracy: High) Responsiveness: Low (73 RPM) (Accuracy: High) Idle Latency: 50.125 milliseconds (Accuracy: High) Interface: en0 Uplink bytes transferred: 69.921 MB Downlink bytes transferred: 278.340 MB Uplink Flow count: 16 Downlink Flow count: 12 Start: 13/05/2023, 15:04:13 End: 13/05/2023, 15:04:27 OS Version: Version 13.3.1 (a) (Build 22E772610a) It supports Apple’s Private Relay, offers some configuration options and allows setting up your own server. More info here. ...

Daniil Charms was considered a children’s author and could not stand children all his life. While his whimsical fairy tales populated illustrated books and magazines, giving him something to live on in the silence of his room, he also feverishly wrote tales for adults, equally imaginative but inhabited by an excruciating melancholy, as in fairy tales went wrong. At the dawn of the USSR, this desperate fantasy of his was tolerable only if it was confined where it was least dangerous, in children’s literature. Back then, adults were the children to be motivated and consoled with uplifting novels aimed at glorifying the rise of the proletariat, a literature Charms refused to adhere to. ...

I read a well-researched story about Redis and its creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as antirez. I was already familiar with many details as I have been following him since OKNotizie and Segnalo, of which I was a user. At the time, as a user, I exchanged a few emails with Salvatore, whom years later I had the pleasure of meeting in person, as we were both speakers at several conferences. ...

Last weekend I attended Eroica 2023, a motorcycling event organized by the Italian branch of the Triumph Owners Motorcycle Club I currently preside. We rode the Eroica route, a legendary gravel bicycle race that runs through the most beautiful territories of the Tuscan Chianti region. It was glorious. The weather was perfect, the food was incredible, and the close-knit party of thirty T.O.M.C.C. bikers had great fun. We all ended up covered in an astonishing amount of powder. ...

Minimalist News is the first LLM project that excites me but in a nervous way. Quoting the About page: We only publish significant news. To find them we use AI (ChatGPT-4) to read and analyze 1000 top news every day. For each article it estimates magnitude, scale, potential and credibility. Then we combine these estimates to get the final Significance score from 0 to 10. And now the best part: We’ll only send you the news scored 6.5 or higher. Sometimes it’s 5 articles, sometimes 2, sometimes 8. And sometimes — none at all. But one thing is constant — you can be sure that you haven’t missed anything important. ...

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.8 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards. As with the previous one, this release also addresses a small undocumented behavior in validating the invoice. See the relevant ticket for the details.